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.