Haying Days

While the Sun Shines - Paintings by Poppy

Could you meet me at the crab apple tree,

Where you and I grew up?
Could you meet me down in the tall hay fields,

Where life was simpler still?
Could we go back to those days?
Can we go back to our haying days?

Those days, we wandered the hills and the breezes were made for us.
Those days, our bicycle rides couldn't have lasted for long enough.

Those days, we laid on our backs counting stars 'til it was too late.

Those days, trust was enough and our parents knew everything.

Those days, we caught fireflies only to let them go again.
Those days, mudpies were the rage in our very own mud cafe.
Those days, I cried when the forts were so cool that I couldn't come in.
Those days, our dogs chased the stones that we shouldn't have thrown but did.

Could you meet me at the crab apple tree,

Where you and I grew up?
Could you meet me down in the tall hay fields,

Where life was simpler still?
Could we go back to those days?
Can we go back to our haying days?

I want to drink from that thermos that my whole family did;

I want to smell that hay that got in our clothes and always itched our skin;
I want to watch my Mom and Dad walk hand in hand;
I want to hold a buttercup underneath my sister's chin.

Can we go back to then? Can we feel those things we once did?
Can we go back again? Can things be simpler like they once have been?

Crush

I want to get it out.
Cut it out of my chest like a cancer,
this sticky, black, heavy burden that

crushes.



Not the beautiful, crashing, cleansing 

crush

of the ocean waves; the elegant pounding of the 
built up tides.



Get it out, this maleficent, heinous, unspeakable

crusher.



Not remotely near to the joyful tension that resonates as with a new

crush;

the boy at school sending tender glances and a playful wink.



How can I rid my lungs, my articulations and my 'wits about me' of this

crushing?



My heart and flesh cry out; my soul longs and even faints.







I am nothing.

Unsocial Life

I love being married. 

I really do.

I love that I have someone that I can wake up when I'm having nightmares, someone that will volunteer to do the dishes when neither of us really want to, someone that I can start a pillow fight with (and promptly, lose). 

I love my husband, so, so much. 

I can't imagine my life without him.


But the truth is, sometimes I get lonely, even when he's around.

What a horrible thing to say, am I right?

But it's true. 


Sometimes, my heart aches when I look back at friends that I've had in the past. How did I let things slip so quickly? How did I not recognize when those friendships were falling away? How could I be so selfish?


Let me tell you: it's incredibly easy.



It's easy to tell yourself that no one could possibly understand how you feel. It's easy to say, "I have hurts and burdens that are way too heavy for me to bear on my own, and obviously no one cares enough about me to be interested in my overly emotional problems." It's easy to start drowning in depression. 

It's easy to find one person who will listen to you and to leave it at that person. Not only did I fall in love with my then-boyfriend, but I found the one person that I would allow myself to trust with my burdens. How unfair is that?

Because, let's face it -- no one likes those kind of awkward conversations where you just have to sit and cry with someone. I don't. It's uncomfortable and it makes me sad. That's just the truth. So, I convinced myself that having those conversations only once was enough.

To those people that I didn't trust enough to share my life with: I'm sorry. I'm sorry that I didn't allow myself to be uncomfortable, both in listening to how you felt and in sharing how I felt. It's easier to avoid talking about problems than it is to work through them with sweaty palms and excruciating silences. It's easier to say nothing than to potentially say the wrong thing. It's easier to avoid eye contact than to look into the darkest places of a persons soul. I'm sorry that I was a coward, and I'm sorry that my actions hurt you.

To my loving, burden-carrying husband: I'm sorry that I put so much pressure on you to be my only emotional support. I'm sorry that finding and sharing my life with community seemed too overwhelming, that I was silent in the small things and waited until they became big boulders of pain to drop on your shoulders. Please forgive me.


Trudging through life feeling lonely is an awful way to live. 

And so, back onto the clumsy, bow-legged horse that is my social life I climb. 

It's finally time that I allow myself to share in life's awkward pauses, terrible misunderstandings, poorly worded condolences, and times of deep, deep sorrow.



Because I would rather share every aspect of life with friends than to find my heart sitting painfully alone at the end of the day. 

Cuss Words and Questions

It's been a difficult few months. 

Illness. Lonliness. Depression. Death.

It's in these recent months that I've truly began to question God's goodness. It's a hard place to be, trying to juggle the tangible depths of pain with the unseen mountains of God's grace and goodness.

How can God be good when He allows our friends and family to fall ill? How is God being good to us when He lets us descend into illness that is debilitating and isolating?

How is God good when we pray that He would send a much needed community to a person's side and yet they stand alone, so sure that they are so alone that they would rather end it all?

How is God good when the sorrows of life seem insurmountable, when the tears can't stop falling and the pain is so strong that you beg He'd take it away?

How good is a God that allows a beautiful, loving, kind young woman to go from living a joyous, impactful life to leaving a void in the lives of everyone who knew her?



Where is the goodness in any of this?





Where is God in all of this?





And that's the thing. 
I don't know the answer.
I don't know any of the answers.
And the people who claim to have the answers can hold their tongues. Really, please, hold your tongue. I don't need to hear the scriptures that people always quote in times like these. I know them.


It's okay to be angry.
It's okay to question.
God is bigger than my cuss words and He's bigger than my doubts.



I choose to live in the tension of not knowing and yet trusting that God is good.

Faith.

anxiety.

It's fear. 
It's anger. 
It's upset tummies and racing heartbeats. 

It's anxiety. 


Anxiety gets me every single time. It seems to overtake me as quickly and mightily as an avalanche of wet BC snow, sliding down a set of vaseline greased marbles on a steep sheet of ice. 
And as stunned as I might seem, I always feel it building. 

Oh yes, the low rumblings, creeping their way into my stomach; 
the hummingbird wings beating in my chest where my heart once was; 
breath... short... lump in throat... inevitable tears where an appropriate response to such seemingly trivial matters should go. 


I seem to have missed some important lessons in my life — like, when I was supposed to tell people how they made me feel, and when they were hurting me. I missed the foundational class of how to express and stick up for myself, without lashing out. Somewhere along the way, I learned that putting other people first, out of love, meant that you were their doormat. 

I was never taught to stick up for myself, out of love. 




A few years back, I finally started the counselling that I knew I'd needed to help me deal with my unresolved issues. It was incredibly helpful to know that, even when I was being completely unreasonable and over-sensitive, my feelings were real and valid. 
I had licence to tell people how they were making me feel. 

Unfortunately, it seemed that, whenever I tried this perfectly legitimate course of action, friendships became tense, I was told off, I wasn't taken seriously. This made for awkward interactions, and, well...


anxiety.




What a tricky little cycle.

What a lonely place to be.

This isn't what God intended.

Gomer

Love is patient, love is kind,

I'll try to keep that all in mind,
If you'll hold your hand in mine.

Won't you hold my right hand,
give me the strength I need to stand?
Isn't that what you promised?

I've been broken, I've been bruised,

Nobody wants to love the used

Love is just another word, for let me hurt you

Will you be my salvation,

the loving arms that won't let me run?

Even though I don't always want it.

Will you persevere?
Break through my walls, and angers and fears
Will you persevere?

Put your hand in mine,
Love is patient, love is kind,

Or so I've been told

Faith, hope, and love these three remain,

won't you bring me home again?

Even though I'm prone to go, go, go, go, go–––?

Will you protect me from myself?

It Is Dangerous to Read Newspapers

While I was building neat
castles in the sandbox,
the hasty pits were
filling with bulldozed corpses

and as I walked to the school
washed and combed, my feet
stepping on the cracks in the cement
detonated red bombs.

Now I am grownup
and literate, and I sit in my chair
as quietly as a fuse

and the jungles are flaming, the under-
brush is charged with soldiers,
the names on the difficult
maps go up in smoke.

I am the cause, I am a stockpile of chemical
toys, my body
is a deadly gadget,
I reach out in love, my hands are guns,
my good intentions are completely lethal.

Even my
passive eyes transmute
everything I look at to the pocked
black and white of a war photo,
how
can I stop myself

It is dangerous to read newspapers.

Each time I hit a key
on my electric typewriter,
speaking of peaceful trees

another village explodes.

-- Margaret Atwood (Published 1968)

A Poet

A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feeling through words.
This may sound easy. It isn't.
A lot of people think or believe or know they feel—but that's thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling—not knowing or believing or thinking.
Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you're a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you're nobody-but-yourself.
To be nobody-but-yourself—in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else—means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
As for expressing nobody-but-yourself in words, that means working just a little harder than anybody who isn't a poet can possibly imagine. Why? Because nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time—and whenever we do it, we're not poets.
If, at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of fighting and working and feeling, you find you've written one line of one poem, you'll be very lucky indeed.
And so my advice to all young people who wish to become poets is: do something easy, like learning how to blow up the world—unless you're not only willing, but glad, to feel and work and fight till you die.
Does this sound dismal? It isn't.
It's the most wonderful life on earth.
Or so I feel.

e.e. cummings (october 26 1955)

Polycephaly

"Polycephaly is a condition of having more than one head.

The term is derived from the stems poly- meaning 'many'

and kephal- meaning "head"."

-- Wikipedia

Little known fact: I think I suffer from polycephaly.

Oh sure, it sounds like it would be useful.

Think of all the advantages to having an extra head:

two brains to contemplate life's challenges;

another tongue to taste all of the bountiful pleasures at our disposal;

four eyes to navigate the world's adventures, not to mention to watch your back at all times;

an extra set of ears to hear the all of our earth's many secrets.

There is no doubt that two heads (or more for that matter) could make a huge difference in our day to day performance.

However, it seems to me that this polycephaly that I deal with is either of a different calibre than the productive version, or I must have missed the memo on how to use it effectively.

Yes, instead of having a more ideal world, my two-headedness has only created problems for me.

Instead of two brains to contemplate life's challenges, I seem to have two critical brains:

one of which will shut off at the slightest hint of a challenge, and the other that is ready to pick a fight with a dying grandmother over the type and colour of yarn she's using to knit her great-granddaughters socks, resulting, no doubt, in a fight to the death, since there is no reasoning with someone who will fight with a dying grandmother over something so trivial.

In lieu of another tongue to taste all of the bountiful pleasures at our disposal, it would seem I have only another tongue [to attempt] to tame.

Rather than four eyes to navigate the world's adventures, I seem to have four eyes that are ready to see that fault of every action I make.

In place of an extra set of ears to hear all of our earth's many secrets, I find that my extra pair only manages to hear whispers of worthlessness, failure, and cut-throat remarks that lurk behind the slightest hint of any condemning tone.

Why is it that I have such a hard time making sure that my head is working the way that God intended? Why is it that I feel a war raging between two selves that exist inside of me?

For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin.

//romans 7.22-25//esv

God?

God?

For the poor and the broken,

The proud and the arrogant,

For the sinner and weeper

For the faithless and the blinded

The bitter and confused

For the trapped and abused

For the lost and the lonely

For the forgotten and faded

The beaten and jaded

The sick and the hungry

For the dying and neglected

For the pained and infected

The spent and misused

And the monsters we’ve loosed

For our lack of repentance

And our selfish spent love

For our pride and our wrongs

Our calluses, quick tongues

For our loyalties laid elsewhere

And when we’ve mocked the cross...

... forgive and mend us Lord.

deut7.6-9//

deuteronomy7.6-9 // For you are a people holy to the LORD your God. The LORD your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on the face of the earth to be his people, his treasured possession.

The LORD did not set his affection on you and choose you because you were more numerous than other peoples, for you were the fewest of all peoples.

But it was because the LORD

loved you

and kept the oath he swore to your forefathers that he brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the land of slavery, from the power of Pharaoh king of Egypt.

Know therefore that

the LORD

your God

is God;

he is the faithful God, keeping his covenant of love to a thousand generations of those who love him and keep his commands. //

Overcoming Unbelief

This is my life, am I who I want to be?

I want to happy.

I want to be satisfied that I am doing my best,

giving my all

and working towards the Glory of the Father in Heaven.

I want the Kingdom here on earth. I want everyone to know that I am impatient, and I don't think that my yearning for bigger, Brighter, BETTER and MORE PERFECT THINGS is unnecessary or some misplaced malcontent.

Because when I pray, Our Father, who art in Heaven, I believe He hears, and I believe His longing is what extends into my heart when I long for Your Kingdom come, Your Will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven.

When all is said and done, I don't want to be known for preaching at people. Heaven knows that's not a gift I've been bestowed.

I don't want to be known for being a quasi-follower, who hits the church on Sundays, works for the good Christian employer, graduated from a wonderful Bible school and lives an exaggerated life of crime and greed and all other corrupt moral variances.

I want to be Upright, in good Standing, and Blameless before the King.

I want the courage to pray for God's justice and then actually have the boldness to stand in the midst of it. I want to pray for correction, rebuking and God's necessary slap upside the head when I fall outside of His will. I want to be able to say that I fully believe and exhibit in full inward and outward action that I am part of God's Kingdom come.

I am part of God's Kingdom come.

Lord, the Spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.

I believe, help me overcome my unbelief.

Marianne Williamson

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

Ecclesiastes

As it would happen, my thoughts seem to rest on Ecclesiastes;

that wondrous book that always helps me along in my cyclical (and often cynical) thinking. Its somewhat exhausting (cyclical thinking, that is), but so is arguing with God, and I've yet to give up on that, so it would seem this is right up my alley.

And here is where it starts: Christmas.

I wont be going home for Christmas. This is my first Christmas away from home. Unable to attend both this festive event and my best friend and sisters weddings (both of which fall on the same day, as luck and poor planning would have it), I was faced with the options of 1) taking a month off work and possibly getting fired, 2) quitting and being destitute and jobless, 3) not going to one of the most important days of my best friend and sisters lives, or 4) missing Christmas with my family on the day that was best estimated that Jesus was actually born. Naturally, the 4th option was the only proper option to choose.

Why are you spending Christmas alone, Barbara?

That's a good question, which, I must admit, is not fully decided upon. But that is neither here nor there. To be honest, I don't have to spend Christmas alone. I have had several offers from several gracious hosts all of whom told me that I would be welcome to join them and their families for Christmas dinner. Somewhere between seeing the variety of great friends to choose from and being told that some of the hosts regularly have 'strays', I found a somewhat bitter-sweet taste in my mouth.

Aside from not liking the comparison of a stray cat to myself, I found myself struggling with another thought: how was I to choose from the friends that offered me a place at their table? Wouldn't picking one be saying that they are the closest to family that I have here and so were a natural choice to be with? For you, the answer may be no, but for me? I have only ever spent Christmas with my family and cannot picture a more appropriate way to spend Christmas than being surrounded by the people who have given me more love, hope and grace, so the idea of choosing someone would be like choosing someone that was closest to my family.

That got me to thinking about family. How do I define family? These past couple of years I've been trying to broaden my outlook of family to include church and friends and coworkers and neighbors and, and, and yet, when I get down to it, I have a hard time seeing family in people that often aren't there for me as unconditionally as my own flesh and blood. I find it hard to be open as if these people were my family and worse yet, I found it incredibly hard to break in, and I'm not sure it was a one time deal. I feel like I have to continually break into a community so that I can fight for acceptance and love, just so I can call it my family. And so, my thinking shifted away from family and more towards home, a concept that I thought I had begun to get a grip on. Well, let me tell you.

Home. How do I define home? I've written songs about home, figuring that home was less of a location and less of who you surround yourself with but more of a sense of self, that home was your central base, the origin in your heart that defined who you were: where every hope we've had, every dream we've dreamed, every word and prayer that we've meant -- that was what I had started to peg home as. Turns out, when Josh Groban sings "I'll be home for Christmas", he doesn't mean that he's going to be true to his hopes and dreams. My backup idea of home was heaven, and to tell the truth, I don't think that's where Josh Groban was planning on spending Christmas either. So, is home where your stuff is and the people are at? Which got me thinking, Ecclesiastes, eh?

What do Christmas and the idea of home being where all your stuff is have in common? STUFF! You get stuff at Christmas, and where do you keep it?

(Ususally) at home. Aha! Ecclesiastes pops into my head at this moment in time.

IT'S ALL MEANINGLESS.

But then I get to thinking, but it's not meaningless. Christ is our meaning. That's why Christmas is such a big deal, right? It was a gift to us when Christ came into the world and we celebrate it by giving and hoping and sharing love and hot chocolate and... and then I realize, I wont be home for Christmas.

... I wont be home for Christmas.

And so then I get to thinking, well, Christmas, I mean, if its all about giving and sharing and loving and hot chocolate, then whats to stop me from just volunteering and loving and caring and giving and sharing my hot chocolate with someone in a soup kitchen? Why not spend Christmas with people who really need some loving and hot chocolate given to them? Which gets me to thinking, why is this just a Christmas attitude, that we exclusively give gifts on the day of the birth of our Saviour? I mean, sure, its very worth celebrating, don't get me wrong, I do not want to under emphasize that fact. But I'm sure that our Saviour would want this attitude to extend long past the day of his birth and to spill over into each and every day and hour and minute, right? Which gets me to thinking, why is Christmas made such a big deal of? Why don't we just give presents and loving and giving and sharing and HOT CHOCOLATE ALL THE TIME?! Which makes me think, is the Christmas we celebrate really just the consumeristic holiday? Which lead me right back to...

ECCLESIASTES.

my brain will find its way back to the root it settles on, every time.

exhausting.