variations on a theme

so much of what i remember about my childhood can be distilled down to things that happened in just a few rooms. my bedroom (of course, hosed down in pink toile and covered with clothes i never quite managed to put up) in our old house, which i feel like i lived in for a thousand years, but really only lived in for just over eight, was the center of my universe. my mother's kitchen, blue and always full, was the place i picked up and dropped off information. our little breakfast nook, where i took nourishment, where we talked about current events, where we fought, where we ate every day, with windows on two sides, seemed like one of the safest places on earth. my father's study was much like my mother's kitchen, in my mind, except it wasn't blue at all, and always smelled like "chaps" cologne and pipe tobacco...i picked up and dropped off information there, as well as being called to the carpet for having a smart mouth, etc. the room i remember today was the family room...

i can still feel the heat of the day coming off the glass blocks, and i can feel the nap of the rug under my legs, which were almost always crossed indian-style, sitting slightly to the left and in front of my father's brown upholstered recliner. behind me, my brother sits in the wing chair, or just behind me on the rug, playing with leggos or micro-machines, or something that screams "hi, i'm seven, and i'm here to make your life a living hell." my mother sits on the couch, at the back of the room, working on a butterfly-themed afghan for my bed. and we're all watching the news, which is weird, because it's the middle of the evening, and shouldn't we all be watching something inane like "Growing Pains"? but we're not. we are definately watching the news. (actually, it's more like The News, because Peter Jennings is Reporting, like God intended. ) and my parents look very nostaligic.

i can see the men climbing on top of the wall, just in front of the brandenberg gate, the checkpoint i heard them call "charlie" in the weeks leading up this night. they have crowbars and hammers and sparklers. the noise coming through the screen is amazing...horns honking, people shouting and singing and crying and calling out the names of loved ones. there are fireworks. there are pictures of presidents, and soundbites, and i hear the one about "mr. gorbechev, tear down this wall" and i remembered watching that bit of news in our old house. Peter Jennings keeps talking about how historic this is. my parents remind me about the olympics, and how now there will only be one germany, and we won't have to feel sorry for the poor east german athletes, anymore, because they don't have to be communists and live away from their families, anymore. and sit there, in our house in brady, about ten million light years away from berlin, and i watch history. i remember sitting there, and reminding myself to remember this. remember that this happened. remember that you had a lump in your eleven year old throat, but couldn't really figure out why. remember.

i remember another day, about ten million light years away from brady, and berlin, and remembering things. i can see myself walking into another museum couryard, just about like every museum courtyard i've walked into since i moved to this city of marble and exhaust fumes. and i see slabs of concrete, replete with graffiti, with stubs of rebar showing, screaming in the silence of masonry that Things Happened. and i put my hands on the mute concrete and i remember the night i saw this wall come down. i remember all the things i learned about it. i remember telling myself to remember that night. and i put my hands out, to touch the silent stones, and i weep with the weight of remembering, and the joy of it, too.

today, i sat down to remember, again. i'm not weeping, today. but i am profoundly joyful, profoundly grateful, profoundly hopeful that the human experience can include the redemptive work of tearing down unjust and ungodly and unneeded walls. i remember that love is a powerful force, but a power that is never bent to dominate. i remember that love wins. love is what tears down walls, not crowbars or dynamite. and that's pretty news-worthy, i think.

mil besos,

rmg

post it notes i wish i'd left for myself to find on the bathroom mirror at two am on days when i can't seem to sleep

dance naked in the rain every single chance you get.
one of the perks of having a privacy fence is just that: privacy.
in the small scope of this life, you will be born a thousand times, but you only have to die once.

letting the rain wash you into the next iteration is important, as important as the waters that washed over you as you were born fresh into the world, mother-naked and blinded by the light, squalling and covered in remnants of a life you will never remember. this dance is important. the steps don't make any difference, nor does the color of paint, or the words and worlds you paint with them. but the dancing is important-vitally so.

you will dance, just like rumi said, in your blood and your bandages. you will be reborn and learn that God forgives you completely, just like Jesus said. you will look at the world in wide-eyed wonder, like you've never seen it before, smelling polyphenols and ozone, and hoping to God that the neighbors aren't up late and looking out their top story windows. but there's a part of you that could care less if they do see you. this is your experience. this is your dance, and there's never been one like it, and there will never be anything close to it, ever again. self-consciousness is a burden too heavy to bear when you're in that alone and not-alone place with God. you will shed old skin, and understand snakes in a way you thought impossible.

when you find yourself dancing, you will realize that you don't believe in words like "impossible", or "war". the only things you think of, the only mantra you can find, the only words that will escape your lips will be all about love, mercy, peace, and hope. the rest of the words don't mean anything, in that context. when you dance, you will know that simple and complicated fact down to the bottoms of your bare feet, caressed by the darkening mulch, making those red toenails you sport 365 days out of the year jump out darker in the contrast. you'll dance to the music you love, whether it's coming from your stereo, or rumbling out of the sky.

this is your communion. this is your holy moment. these are the words of institution. this is your wailing wall, your holy of holies, your tabernacle, your mt. horeb, your singing praises on trail out of babylon. and it won't matter that some people will think you are a heretic, an exhibitionist, a crazy. because when you dance naked in the rain, it all makes sense. all the colors bleed to green and gray, to black and silver, and darkest blue, and the color of water that holds them all together, and even at night, you can imagine the rainbow of promise that is lingering and wooing the world back to wholeness, somewhere. when you dance, you put to sleep all the nay-sayers, the down-keepers, the ancient and unrequited love, and the longing for small children of your own. when you dance, you know that you are what God made you to be--unique, free, happy, grateful, redeemed, adorded, forgiven, loved, and at peace. the rest of what you might or might not ever be doesn't even start to matter while your feet are moving and your body is swaying. this a good thing to know.

rain is forcasted all week. blessed be.

mil besos,
rmg

episode 300, in which rachiepoo tells you a story of two deserts.

this is my 300th post. for some reason, that seems like a really big deal to me, and at the same time, seems kind of ridiculous. i seem to be of two minds about a lot of things lately. duality, causality, context, and synchronicity seem to be the themes running in my life, through my brain, and in the world that i know, right now. and to tell the truth, i've never been more ready to see what comes next.

The first time I got lost in the desert, I was with two of my girlfriends from college. We went to the desert to camp, to see new things, swim in new pools, climb new mountains. We went to the desert to shed old skin, to tell each other sad things, to tell each other hopeful things, to laugh, to cry, and to stare up at the stars, with the asphalt hot against the skin of our backs, on the high-line drive, where no cars were allowed after dark, to pass cigarettes and wine glasses back and forth, to sleep harder than we had slept in months. That we got lost wasn’t so scary, because we were together, and we were experienced campers. What was scary was that we were so close to not being lost, at all, but just couldn’t seem to quite get to where we needed to be. I think the edge of missing the mark, just missing by a hair, is so much harder than being absolutely annihilated. So I felt about being lost. I knew we would eventually end up where we needed to be. I just didn’t know how long we would have to wander.

June in those desert mountains was a beauty to behold. Everything was still flush from the spring, ripening to summer, like a pretty girl after a nice kiss. All the shades of green, hit randomly with pinks, yellows, occasional brilliant orange, and the whiteblack blur of quail startled out of their hiding places said that the desert is far from a dead place. Coming through Wild Rose Pass, with San Solomon Springs behind us, I knew that we had come to a place where we could find what we needed, and leave behind what needed to be left.

Sometimes, I think what you leave in a place is as important as what you take away. I mean that literally, as well as figuratively. We tried never to leave physical evidence that we had been someplace when we were camping, aside from the park-installed fire ring. But we did leave a lot behind, in the ashes inside that fire ring. We each left something we needed to get rid of. For me, it was realizing that a guy I had only gone on a couple of dates with was really bad news, and even though he was the best kisser I’d ever met, I knew that nothing about where we were going was good. God, it was hard to say that…was harder still to hear it said back to me by my sister-friends. But I needed to say it, and I needed people who loved me enough to hold me accountable to hear it.

For fifty-odd days this summer, the temperature has been over 100 degrees. It’s starting to mess with my head. I feel like I’m dealing with the worse case of pms in my whole life, and the period to beat all periods is hours from beginning, wreaking an almighty havoc upon my life the likes of which I have never imagined, much less experienced. Aggression seems to simmer just below the surface, like I could go out and pick a fight with Gandhi or push down a blind kid. I feel aggressive, paranoid, anxious, and maybe a little bit strung out. All the brown lawns and the blinding light of the sun are buzzing in some bizarre bass line that makes my eyes tear up. I don’t even want to drive around my favorite neighborhoods and look at houses…it just makes me want to cry.

I wake up and pray for rain. I go to sleep, and I pray for rain. I wake up and go to the bathroom, and I pray for rain. I toyed with the idea of putting my underpants in a ziplock bag in the freezer, like Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch. I didn’t do it. And then the other day, I was really in a bad way, and found myself thinking about that trip to the mountains with Kristen and Laura. I thought about the clarity of thought I had on that trip, I thought of what I left behind, what I took away, how I feel right now.

And I realize that what I’m feeling now is a lot like what I felt four summers ago, when we went the long way around the mountain. The difference is that I’m not on vacation, and the bulk of this little sojourn has been on my own, in a manner of speaking. Being in the desert of this summer has been profoundly difficult. It’s also been incredibly beautiful.

Last night, for no good reason other than God's own great mercy (and isn't that the best reason of all), it rained in this desert of a city, parched and languishing in the last month of the longest summer of my life, and the only one I'll live as a 30 year old. As I drove down 281, back to my little house, and my fat cat, I was running the windshield wipers at full speed. And when I got home, and walked through my back door, I could smell my rosemary and lavendar giving up their sweet fragrance, I could smell the ozone in the air from the light show in the clouds, and I was so very happy. I pulled the clip out of my hair (which I can't wait to cut...ten inches for little bald kids is a LOT of hair, and I'm almostbutnotquite there yet), shook the day's tension out of my shoulders, and danced. Rumi, one of my favorite poets, said this: "Dance, when you're broken open. Dance, if you've torn the bandage off. Dance in the middle of the fighting. Dance in your blood. Dance, when you're perfectly free."

I imagined that this year of my life would bring change, mostly internal. I planned it that way. I promised myself that by the time I turned 31, things that I struggled with in my life, for huge parts of my life, would be confronted and dealt with in healthy ways. The list isn't complete, not by a long shot, but I've made a dent. I've allowed myself to start thinking about going back to school, about believing in the strength of my own convictions, of the sanctity of real and profound surrender. I am still who I was on the last day of my 29th year, who I have always been, down to my toes. But I have shed some skin, drug the dead parts over and over the rocks in my path, and left the bits that didn't belong to me anymore for someone else to wonder about. The marvel of all of this to me is that so much of this has taken place inside myself, inside my head, and heart, and soul. Most of the conversations I've had have been just between me and God. To say that I am grateful for this experience, even the things I've said goodbye to in my heart of hearts, would be a gross understatement. There's not a word I know to make it big enough.

I remember when Laura and Kristen and I figured out that we were right where we needed to be to pick up a trail back to our tent. The relief I felt was almost overwhelming. I teared up a little bit. I am tearing up a little thinking about it right now, four years after the fact. We shambled down the switchbacks, trying not to run, trying to conserve our energy, and I was trying not to show how really scared I had been. I drank three 32 ounce bottles of water until I finally had to go to the bathroom. We had to hang our clothes out on the campsite clothesline to dry them, and I was suprised they didn't have salt flakes on them once they were finally dry. But that night, by the fire, and later that night up on the highline drive, we laughed and laughed and told story after story, just happy to be safe, and not lost, and still on our adventure.

I feel like that now. I feel like I have been in the desert. Like I took the long way around the mountain. Like I am most definately not lost, anymore. And I am still on my adventure.

mil besos,
rmg

most favorite thing

mom and grammy bought me an adirondack chair as an early birthday gift. i put it together as soon as i got it, and literally sit in it every night. best present, maybe ever.

it's a lovely night.

mil besos,
rmg

the not-oprah list of my favorite things of summer

in no particular order...

*thighmaster-- i bought one for $5 on amazon.com, and paid $15 to have shipped. i have used this thing RELIGIOUSLY, and am totally amazed. seriously.

*psalm 91.-- i read it at least once a day. this is my security blanket, at the moment. and i revel in it.

*long hot baths with epsom salts

*the dark tower books-- which i read from beginning to end in five weeks, because i love love love that story.

*fiesta dress that i wear to the pool. maybe my favorite piece of clothing, because it's green and has a peacock on it. close second is the wonderful and beautiful gauze shirt mom bought for me last month. it's in heavy rotation, at the moment.

* watermelon-- i can't remember the last time i craved a food, and this summer, i just can't seem to eat enough of this lucious treat. i honestly think that watermelon and the steadfast love of the baby Jesus have kept me sane this summer.

*old movies-- the ones that seem to explain how life is, right at this moment, and the people in my life who know just what those movies are, and just which line to say at the perfect moment. "melrose place is a really good show..."

*my cell phone and text messages-- i know, i know, i know. but my life would be so much more complicated without them. i love my cell phone. it's outdated, doesn't do anything fun, and is probably due for an oil change soon, but i just don't care. i love my phone.

*music-- like a super lot. all day long. all the time. and if i'm not listening to music, i'm thinking about listening to music. this summer's stand outs have been paul simon, emmy lou harris, bob marley (always a summer classic), lady gaga (that hurt to type), the jayhawks, led zepplin, the new pornographers, and (as always) a lot lot lot of bob dylan.

*kiss my face peaceful patchouli lotion and soap--even though one of my besties says that patchouli smells like a dirty hippy's armpit, i just don't care. i love how it smells, and i love these products. it's the simple things that get you through the most mundane days. also, an honorable mention goes out to ZUM bar soap, also in patchouli. i love this stuff.

*jinx the cat--he is the face i come home to at the end of the day, and even on days when i am not my best, jinx is always happy to see me, happy to love me, happy to share my space. he is a huge blessing in my life. i have learned more about unconditional love this summer than i ever imagined was possible, and a great majority of that learning has come while spending time with my cat. G-d knew what needed to happen when jinx came to live with me...

*movie popcorn--i learned that if i'm not hungry for watermelon, and just can't get a handle on what i want, it's probably movie popcorn. weird, right?

*this blog--this has been my mental refuge during this long, hot, incredibly weird summer. it's sometimes hard to remember that this summer has had some very happy and unexpected miracles all over it, because what screams loudest this summer is that a lot of things and people (not just famous ones) have died...i mean, just look at the lawns in my neighborhood. but i know that when i sit down to write, something fresh always comes to take the dry taste away, even if what i'm saying is hard. the reality of writing down how i feel, what i think, what's happening, even if it's veiled or abstract or in third person is just so good to feel, even when the feelings are intense and sometimes painful. thank you for reading.

mil besos,
rmg

3am, again.

"It is looking at things for a long time that ripens you and gives you a deeper understanding."--vincent van gogh

i find myself thinking about romance in a totally different way than i did when i was 20. i'm glad the changeover has happened, to be quite honest. i don't think what i thought i knew about romance was even remotely correct, or that having someone jump through those hoops would have really made me happy. that's not to say that i don't think there's room enough in my life for romance. i think i just mean that romance means different things to me at 30 than it did at twenty...and i'm so glad i know that about myself.

i think if i'd had someone cater to my romantic whims at 20, i would have become pretty petulant and selfish. i mean, does anyone really need to go to four restaurants in one night...appetizers in one, entrees in another, dessert in yet another, and topped off by fancy grown-up drinks at the last? i know at 30, i'd be much happier with a good, non-tedious, honest and energetic conversation over a piece of pie in one of my favorite all-night diners.

at 20, romance would have looked like my favorite flowers on my birthday. at 30, i think romance might look like new light blubs in my vanity sockets, maybe a an extra half-gallon of milk grabbed on the way home, just in case we were running low, or having those horrible new license plates magically appear on my car. at 20, a romantic get-away would have been way over-planned, and under-enjoyed...too much money, too many things to see, too much drama to get there, etc. at 30, i think it looks like a couple of backpacks, a map, a lot of music, and a little money.

at 20, having someone read my mind and and intuit all my needs before i even articulated them would have seemed like a reasonable relationship goal. now...not so much. at 30, i think i have begun to understand that if we can find someone in this life who just really gets who we are, down at the bottom of all our bullshit, and decides to stick around anyway, is something pretty special. all the rose petals and high dollar champagne in the world can't compete with that. that's not something that sells books, or makes it to reality tv. that's not something you can ever cash in and use as a bail out. that's an intangible, a for better or worse kind of deal. that's a bigger deal that a remembered birthday, trite poetry, fancy dinners out, or knowing the day you had your first kiss. i feel good about knowing that, at least for myself. and on days when i wake up at 3am, wondering what it's all about, sometimes knowing that helps me get back to sleep.

mil besos,
rmg

fable

Once upon a time, there lived a very curious little girl with brown hair and blue-gray eyes. She often found herself tiptoeing toward places she might not should go. When she was eight, her parents moved (with her and her small brother, of course) into a big red brick house on a tree-lined street, in the middle of town. This was a magic house.

The magic house seemed to go on forever, and the little girl found herself wandering around the house and the yard with big eyes, and open ears, imagining that the next little half-door in the wall would take her to Narnia or Middle Earth or someplace she’d never heard of. She was fascinated. Her grandfather, the kind of older man who seemed to have special magic or medicine (or maybe both) with small children, helped out a lot with the move. He also managed to keep the little girl and her little brother out of trouble…most of the time…with very inventive stories.

The previous owner of the magic red brick house, an older man (much like the little girl’s grandfather…he had magic and medicine, too), had dug out an old cellar, to the right of the back door, next to the fence line. Years and years had gone by since anyone had used the cellar, and the ground had shifted and water had filled the hidey-hole. The little girl and her even littler brother were mesmerized by the cellar. You can imagine that had the little girl or her little brother ever actually made it to the cellar, this story would be very different. You may also be asking yourself how two intrepid adventurers ever managed to find the self-control to avoid such a place. In a word…the answer is the mystical, mythical, magical bullagator. Of course, the bullagator in the cellar was repatriated when the little girl’s grandfather knocked the cellar in with his forklift and beaucoup fill dirt later that summer. Little was heard from or about the bullagator until the little girl with brown hair and blue-gray eyes became a big girl with brown hair (and some grey creeping in) and blue-gray eyes and a job at summer camp.

The Good Lord knows that nothing says fun quite like like a tetanus shot or a near drowning….hence, in God’s great wisdom (and the wonderful mind of Poppy’s with good medicine and magic), the bullagator was born. Bullagators are half bulldog, half alligator. And if a child should find herself someplace she ought not to be, a bullagator might magically appear to bite her little nose off. Bullagators are fearsome creatures. Not much was known about the bullagator until 2006, other than their magical business as the guardians of flooded cellars. It seems that bullagators are not only the guardians of flooded cellars, but also stretches of the Guadalupe River and partially collapsed barns that seem to scream “HEY KIDS!! COME PLAY OVER HERE!”

Extensive research has been done on bullagators in the last three years, and that research has borne much fruit. For instance, we now know that in addition to biting off the faces of naughty children who stray into restricted areas, they can lob acidified spit wads at least four feet. The spit wads can cause nasty flash burns, as well as causing rocks (lobbed by naughty children, to check to see if bullagators REALLY are REAL, no doubt) to burst into flame. Bullagators are about the size of Labrador Retrievers. They can be tamed, but only if you can whistle “A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes” backwards, with no mistakes. They also really like black jelly beans and Hank Williams on vinyl.

And in case you were wondering, the little girl is still living happily ever after. At least, that's the way I heard it.

mil besos,
rmg

a true story that never really happened...

she's a pretty smart cookie, that one. not much happens that suprises her. oh sure, every once in a while, she has an off-day, but usually, that kid's head is on a swivel. she's the clutch player. she's the go-to. she's competent. and she is deadly efficient. the only caveat to that little rule...this kid only works alone. that makes the job harder, but with the ripping and tearing that she sometimes has to do, it also makes the job quicker.

she hides all the soft places she can think of...hides them very well, most people don't even know where to start looking, anymore. she's approaching solitude, and that both frightens her and kind of excites her. it's like one day, a switch was flipped, and she realized that if solitude was what life was going to throw at her, she would catch it and wear it like a crown. nothing marks her but her, like using a low grade diamond to cut one of a higher grade. she isn't particularly happy about how this feels, but life is too short to complain. sometimes she feels like she's watching it all happen outside of herself, and sometimes that's because even she can't believe what's happening, how it's happening, or even why. but it is. her life is happening. and it's not bad. not at all. not even a little bit.

she didn't mean to lie to him. really, she didn't. he's one of those people who knows the soft places, one of the ones she's invited. she knew better. he's such an old soul. she tells herself that she knows he's not perfect, but she really thinks he kind of is. and is he a trainwreck...God, yes. such a mess and jumblefuck of emotions and manifestos and guitar strings and beer bottles and cigarettes and ghosts of girlfriends past, and she loves him extra because of the mess. but she lies to him regularly. she has no desire to be what she is to him. but it's all she can be, and she'd rather be that than nothing. but she reserves the right to not have her face rubbed in it, which is why she lied and missed hearing her favorite song, and pretty much cried the whole way home.

the weight of that lie gets to her, but she chokes it down with a burning shot of pride, flicks her hair back, and keeps walking. she is pulling away from him. it's never going to be what she wants, and she's to a point that rather than have left overs, she'd really rather have nothing, but thanks for offering. it's past time. about three years past time, truth be told. almost exactly.

she remembers snips and phrases from her geometry class in high school. lines are infinite. parallel lines will always run parallel to each other. they never intersect. she thinks this is a lot like where she is with him. they see each other just fine. but they will never be on the same track. ever. this is physics. this is universal truth at it's very deepest, at least as far as their story is concerned. it doesn't matter what makes the tracks parallel...weight, distance, fright, uncertaintly, wrong hair or eye color, because it all amounts to the same thing...parallel tracks will never be more than parallel tracks. they don't bend, or move, or intersect. they are as close as they will ever be, and nothing can change that. all that fancy talk about it almost being like incest notwithstanding...and it was all just bullshit to make her feel better, anyway, things are the way they are, and ever shall be. it's time to just cut the cord and be done with it, just the same.

she is almost who she wants to be. but the weight of this pulls her back to places she never wanted to see again. cutting ties...tying up loose ends...parallel lines and universes...crosby stills nash and young...buying vinyls...doing yoga...losing fifteen pounds...stopping the clock...she is very tired, but she's getting her life right.

weird story, right...came to me in a dream...

mil besos,
rmg

from the southside, vol. 1

"only love

can bring the rain

that makes you yearn to the sky.

only love

can bring the rain

that falls like tears from on high"

--pete townsend

so i'm sitting at my desk, wrapping up a short day in the office. there is plenty to do to fill this whole day, but i have other things to do. i'm waiting on an email to tell me that caro and alex's little girl made it into the world safely. today is cate's birthday. today is a pretty sweet day. later today, i'll drive across a stretch of texas, so i can attend the funeral of a great lady, with whom i shared my birthday. in a few days, i'll celebrate the birthday of one of "my babies" first baby. next weekend, i'll go spend some time with my brother and sister-in-law, who just lost a dear friend. and in a few short months, two new babies will make their presence known in the world, and just knowing that is coming down the pike is pretty incredible.

life and death are so very intertwined. i say that, i write it, and i think that it's too simple to just say it like that. but maybe it IS that simple. maybe solving the mystery, whistling in the dark, trying to make sense out of something that is so far beyond what we can even start to comprehend is just an exercise in futility. i wish i knew why and how babies really were made. i mean, i get the mechanics, that's not the issue. i wonder why some people can have them, why some people can't, why some people choose to raise other people's babies. at the same time, i wonder why some people get sick, why some people get well, why some people die with a whole life behind them, and why some people die with a whole life unlived in front of them. i don't understand it at all. and i don't want to want to understand it, anymore. i want to just accept the mystery and the ultimate gift that each life and death offers to us. even if i had the answers, who's to say that i would even understand them. they would probably make about as much sense as the quadratic equation, which is none. so, i imagine that's just as well.

God's ways are so much higher than my own. and i suppose that knowing that makes all the difference in how i feel today, a day of very mixed and very different emotions.

a friend sent me a message last week about rain falling from the southside of heaven. i like that thought. it means we aren't so divorced from heaven, after all, and i think that's a good thing. in church, i spend a lot of time wrestling with the idea of the already and the not yet, the Kingdom of God between us, and the Kingdom that is coming. so to think of myself as just on the outskirts, the almost/the not-quite, of heaven, seeing things through a veil, that makes me feel like all the emotional whiplash of the last few days is much less severe.

the births, the deaths, the miracles, the meanings in the tea leaves, and all the different journeys down all the different roads... i am learning to lean into them. and thanks be to God for favors large and small.

mil besos,

rmg

snakes on a fence

Ezekiel 16:6-8 (Young's Literal Translation)

6 And I do pass over by thee, And I see thee trodden down in thy blood, And I say to thee in thy blood, Live, And I say to thee in thy blood, Live.

7 A myriad -- as the shoot of the field I have made thee, And thou art multiplied, and art great, And comest in with an excellent adornment, Breasts have been formed, and thy hair hath grown -- And thou, naked and bare!

8 And I pass over by thee, and I see thee, And lo, thy time [is] a time of loves, And I spread My skirt over thee, And I cover thy nakedness, And I swear to thee, and come in to a covenant with thee, An affirmation of the Lord Jehovah, And thou dost become Mine.

I would do almost anything to see rain. A three-day soaker over a three-day weekend, the kind where you stay in bed and watch movies and eat popcorn and only stop to make more tea, go to the bathroom, or make out…that’s the kind of rain I mean. I’m to the point of painting my mother-naked body with poster paint, run out in the backyard and dance around for a couple of minutes. It’s dryer here than it’s been since the Nineteen Twenties. The river I watched climb out of her banks in front of my twenty-year-old eyes now lays sluggish and shriveled well beneath the stairs I once used with such ease on hot springtime and long summertime days a decade ago.

Everything inside of me seems to be crying for rain, echoing the wilting green screams of the lawns and gardens all around town, county, region, state. I see the popup thunderheads, so proud in the afternoons, irony gray and tinged with blue against the movie screen of memory. But what I really see is heat mirages billowing up on the asphalt that lines 410, the way the sky looks so hot and high that it’s just all white, no blue, nothing remotely like a cloud to even tease you with the promise of a little shade.

I remember the time my little brother saw rain for the first time. He was almost two. We were at my grandmother’s house, being hooligans. Clouds gathered, thunder began to rumble, and those precious drops began to color up the sidewalk. I started stripping off my clothes, running for my bathing suit, and threw open the door the minute I was decent, making a bee-line to the browning lawn to dance like a very small savage doing a spastic almost-six-year-old interpretation of a rain dance. My little brother walked onto the porch, holding my mother’s hand, looked up with his impossibly blue eyes and dirty blonde hair, and wanted to know what was falling from the sky.

It’s so dry…people who are caught using sprinkler systems more than once every two weeks are getting huge tickets. Only hand-watering is allowed every day. People are even doing laundry at Laundromats to save on their water bills, and to reduce water waste. My toilet won’t stop leaking, and that makes me feel like a horrible person, so I’m replacing the guts tomorrow. Should be an interesting trip to Home Depot…I’m a little nervous, truth be told.
But what I really want is rain…the kind that comes on slow and steady, making the dirt smell green, rinsing the dust and grit away. I really should wash my car, but I can’t bear to think about using all that water. But the car really does look kind of nasty.

I’m sitting here listening to bluegrass music, turned up loud. Bluegrass sounds so cool, clinging, refreshing to me, even the sad songs. It reminds me of the smell of rain in the woods…the way it smells like resin, and how you can almost hear the leaves getting fat and sated with the moisture. I remember swimming neck-deep in the Little Blanco River during a rainstorm in October...it was still warm enough to swim. I love swimming in the rain…not in lightening, but in the rain. It’s such an incredible sensation. I remember being neck-deep, big fat drops making splashes on the water and throwing up a fine mist, almost like it was raining up, and seeing the leaves in the hills just starting to get yellow and orange, and in the back of my head hearing “Yonder Stands Little Maggie”, with Ralph Stanley belting his guts out.

I want it to rain. I want to sit in my kitchen and eat a bowl of grits and drink a pot of coffee and listen to the rain smack against the metal roof of the carport. I want to run out the backdoor, thank God for privacy fences, shuck my clothes and take an outside shower, rinse my hair in the rain, and laugh like a small child, smelling my rosemary and lavender giving off their perfume in their own thanksgiving to God. There will be water if God wills it…I read that somewhere, once in a great story about knights and towers and a quest. I know there will be water if God wills it…I hope God wills it.

Shit has been weird for the last couple of weeks. The heat is getting to people, and it’s hanging a kind of lethargy over everyone, or it seems to have done so with me, at least. All I can think of is how hot it is outside. Seriously. Weird things have been afoot lately, they just seem to be made even more weird and sort of extra shitty because it’s so effing hot. I’m not kidding. The news did a whole play-ground experiment and tested the equipment with an infrared thermometer during one hot afternoon. The effing pavement was 140 degrees…that’s the temperature at which you poach an egg. It’s got to rain, or people are going to start going a little nutty, I think. It’s like some kind of seasonal disaffective disorder. I feel like I'm having to actively restrain myself from punching people in the face, just on general principle because it's just too damn hot. I wish I were kidding. I'm so not.

I keep looking for rings around the moon, to see if the sage bushes on the esplanade down my street are starting to pink up, to see if people in slightly shady neighborhoods are hanging dead snakes on their back fences, yet. I seriously have been waking up and going to sleep praying for rain.

Mercy…

Also, please pray for Jane.

mil besos,

rmg

the more they stay the same...

it's one of those images that's etched on to my brain. it's never far from my memory, which probably means something weird. i can still see him in my mind, tall, dark hair, pants about a size too big, with a white button down shirt who's sleeves were rolled to the elbow, a paper bag in one hand, and his jacket slung over the other. he's waving his hands and screaming, daring the tank in front of him to mow him down. every time i see footage of that young man, all i can think is what i thought the day i saw that happen on cnn..."gosh, i hope they win".

i find myself now, in front of the television, watching something so oddly similar happen in iran. and i see them veiled, terrified, screaming green down the streets in tehran. gosh, i hope they win.

mil besos,
rmg

apples and pears

Did you ever see something that you knew totally made sense to someone else, but looked like total gibberish to you? You feel like you can kind of make sense out of the edges, but the total message misses you by miles. That’s what this picture makes me think of, how it makes me feel. I guess the responsible way to phrase that would be that I respond with a sense of anxiety and inadequacy when I view this photo. I suppose it’s kind of pointless to give this picture credit for influencing my emotions…can you tell I’ve been working with a shrink?

I guess because I have been in therapy for a while now, I am thinking of things like my reactions, my plans, my desires and my requirements, my prayers, my ambitions and expectations, and a lot about my failings. I have done a lot of letting go, a lot of forgiving, a lot of crying, and a lot of hoping. At then end of the day, I am grateful for every step that has brought me to this point, even the steps taken that lead directly to stumbles and falls from grace, the steps that ended in crying heaps on my kitchen floor, or finding my adult self crying in the shower, begging for some new measure of understanding about what this life means in this present moment.

I wrote an entry in my journal on New Year’s Day 2009. I wrote about shooting stars, wishes, prayers, the weight of how we feel when we really want something with our whole selves, or at least how I feel. I could picture my young self, so fresh, so sure of herself on the outside and so terrified of never measuring up to some line she wasn’t even sure really existed. I remembered laying my long chunky body down on the sidewalk outside our red brick house on College Street, half on the pavement, feeling the heat of the day seeping into my legs and the fabric of my shorts, with the other half on the shaded patch of grass, peeping between pecan branches and making shapes out of white puffy clouds.

I can see it now through the eyes of a thirty year old woman, not a nine year old girl. I know words like cumulus, dopler effect, radiant heat, transcendentalism, and I can play the word association game like nobody’s business. When I was nine, I don’t think I knew a whole lot about much. I never would have imagined words like dichotomy, paradigm shift, orthopraxis, or quarter-life crisis.

At that point, I still was sure I would be a doctor, and that by the time I was 12, I wouldn’t be such a fatty. Those were things I was sure of. I was also sure that my room would never be clean enough. I was sure that if I studied and made 100’s, the kids in class would tease me about being too smart, even more than they already did. I mean, I didn’t really even understand why a kid accusing me of reading the dictionary in my spare time was a bad thing. Because of that, I was also sure that by not studying, and being lazy, and still making 96’s and 98’s, and sometimes a lower 90 or high 80 would infuriate my parents at home. Even at the tender age of nine, I realized the need to pick my battles. I also understood that sometimes, you have to sacrifice a battle to win the war. But I wouldn’t learn that phrase until late high school. Once I did learn it, so many things made sense.

I think about that little girl in her front yard. I can see her. I can hear her breathing. I can remember how she felt..so calm and so frantic, at the same time. She already seems to know that life is most firmly and fully lived right on the edge of things. She doesn’t know it, but hormones are beginning to charge into her blood stream by the bucket full. In just a few short months, she’ll start her first period. She will be amazed at the power of her own body, but she won’t have words to put with that feeling for at least ten more years, and even then, she’ll only think them very quietly, because she won’t understand that it’s ok to be a girl and like that about yourself until she’s at least 25. Then, when she turns 28, she will realize that she’s becoming the woman she always wanted to be, saying the words she’s learned and now knows what they mean, and why they mean what they do. I wonder if whispering any of these things in her ear would make her feel any better, or if she would even remotely understand what I was trying to tell her. I’d like to think I was a pretty smart little kid, but I don’t think I was quite that smart.

I don’t know if telling her anything would be a good idea. I mean, if you could soothe some of the anxiety of growing up, even if it was just to tell yourself that things will get better, would you do it? If you knew it wouldn’t tear the space time continuum, or create a black hole, or alter the course of human history, would you tell yourself that it was all going to work out? Would you trust the fates enough to tell yourself that as a nine year old? Would you be worried that you might be speaking too soon, that the bottom would surely drop out in the present, and that you’d be telling a lie to your nine year old self about things being alright, eventually? In the final analysis, it’s probably a good thing we don’t have that choice. We are most likely best served to believe that the past is always prologue.

But I wonder about that little girl, with hopeless hair, blue grey eyes, and the vague sense that she is on some kind of track toward something. She knows exactly what she needs to get by—she knows she is loved and Loved by something bigger than she can really imagine. She knows she likes to pray, and she wants to know God. She believes in miracles and knows that at some point, because she lives in a universe that is still so very black and white, fairy tales really are real. She even still half-heartedly believes in Santa Claus, because she likes the idea of believing in a nice idea, even though she won’t know that’s what that feeling is for another 15 years.

I think about her, and I look at her in my memory. I want to tell her that we eventually get a handle on all that hair, but that we have some unfortunate mishaps and fall into some tragic fads along the way. It won’t be cheap, but it will be interesting and colorful on the way.

I want to tell her that when she is an adult, those eyes that seem to never be the same color two days in a row will be her best friend. She will learn to use them to look past the surface. She will learn that people trust her eyes, and she will use that influence for good, because she will learn that betrayal is the cardinal sin, and even though she won’t read Dante’s Inferno until she’s 28, she will understand the feeling much earlier. She will be grateful when people compliment her eyes. That will be something that makes her feel set apart and special and she will have to try not to be vain about them. She will also have to learn to deal with the fact that she has a horrible poker face. This will mean that she’s going to have to learn to tell the truth, but to be careful with her words. She will know the flavor of “first, do no harm” long before she learns about the Hippocratic Oath.

She never quite loses the knowledge of the love she has or the Love she receives. There are a few moments that are awfully low, and for that I do wish I could give her a happy thought to store away for tearful mornings, letters she will wish she had locked in a drawer but sent because it was the right thing to do at the time, and letters that arrived at just the right moment. She won’t learn the true meaning of the phrase “situational ethics” until she is almost 30, but all of those letters and their aftermath and afterglow, they all prepared her to savor the meaning and the occasional mercy of the same.

I want to tell her to be careful with her love, but at the same time, I want her to love with her whole heart, every single time. I want to reassure her that seven years from where she sprawls out on that patch of concrete and grass, she will fall in love for the very first time. And it will feel better than anything else in her whole entire life will feel. And it will hurt worse than anything else in her whole entire life will, in ways she can’t imagine. She will learn to be thankful for that first love, because that’s the feeling she will always try to match, because it was so amazing and vivid. She will be grateful for that first heartache, because she will know that she will always come out stronger on the flip side, because nothing is as hard as the first time. She will learn that regret is a necessary component for nostalgia, and nostalgia is what reminds you of why you are happy to not live in the past.

She will learn things about God that she can’t imagine now. God will be huge and infinite, and sometimes even at nine, she can see the edge of what that means just at the moment she stops saying her prayers and slips off to sleep. But she will also learn about God as a God of small things, too, impossibly small in the face of infinite depth and breadth. She will learn about all sorts of paradoxes. She will find herself in the Bible, see stories from angles that would seem so foreign and alien to her nine year old mind. She will be enthralled by Elijah. She will befriend Peter. She will come to know Jesus as her brother, her friend, and her savior in a thousand new ways.

She will wish there were times when she could walk away from the knowledge that God’s will is where she wants to be, because sometimes that means being uncomfortable and angsty. But she will know a deep and profound center of things, she will learn to live away from the mountain-top experiences, and find deep peace in the middle places. I wish I could tell her that the peaks and valleys are going to be intense, but that the middle places are where she will catch her breath and see some amazing things. I want to tell her that she will dream dreams one day that will remind her of God’s promises.

I want to tell her to that the story of Gideon will be something she needs to find and own. I want to tell her that Bob Marley is going to be important. I want to tell her that one day, she will learn about synchronicity and non-violence, liberation theology, and experience the steadfast love of Jesus in the most ordinary and mundane ways.

I want to tell her not to worry about her nervous stomach, or her big feet, or the fact that she hasn’t learned to use her humor to full effect. I want to assure her that she will get a first kiss, she will learn how to dance. I want to tell her that it’s ok to want things to be fair, to be better than they are. I want to tell her that while her idealism will be tempered, she will always, even in the darkest of places, not ever really be able to suppress the hope and conviction that things are going to get better.

I want to tell her these things. Not give her specifics, no cheat sheets about the math portion of her college boards, or boys she should never kiss, or girls she should never be friends with, or the colors of her dreams or the flavors of her birthday cakes, just give her a little bit of hope. Give her a little bit of sunshine to keep in her pocket. I wouldn’t dream of telling her of the heartaches, or the train wrecks, or the small and large deaths she will witness and feel. I won’t tell her about the horrible haircuts, the blown test grades, the hangovers, the way that some mean kids grown up to be mean adults. That would take out some of the flavor of the gumbo life will offer her.

I imagine that when I am sixty, twice as full of years and experience as I am today, I will imagine my 30 year old self as I am now. I’m on my regular side of the bed, farthest away from the door. I have on a pair of boxer shorts I stole from my grandfather when I was in high school or junior high and a pink shirt I spilled bleach on while I was cleaning my bathroom the week after I bought it. The cat is grooming himself at my feet, and I’m in the first house I ever owned. Everything I own is in this house, its all in one place, for the first time since I was 18.

I am afraid most of the time that I will end up single, childless, and alone with several more cats, and that people will think I wasted my life. At this point, I kind of have a hard time disagreeing with them. I can’t come to terms with the fact that all or some of those things may end up being true at some point. I don’t think they will end up being true, and that’s mostly because I can’t manage to beat the hope out of the nine year old sprawled on the pavement in front of the house that my brain immediately flashes whenever I think of “my house”, even though I haven’t lived there in over ten years.

I hope when I’m sixty, I’ll want to come back and tell myself mostly the kind of thing I’d like to tell my nine year old self.

Don’t worry so much. You’re going to be fine. You are going to see some amazing things, and some things you’d rather not see. You’re going to laugh and cry a lot. You will doubt yourself some of the time. You will sometimes believe in things that aren’t all the way true, but you’ll eventually figure things out, and fix what you can.

You will need to read the letters in your bottom drawer periodically, to remind you of things you have forgotten, and places you still have left to go. You will still revel in the simple things, like hot cement and cool grass and big white clouds. You will fall in love, as many times as you need to, and one day, it’ll be for all the marbles. You will have amazing friends who will hold your hope on dark days, and you will do the same for them.

People will die, in big and small ways. You will keep picking up rocks, be enchanted by mysteries and mystics, and want to be at the beach every Summer Solstice. You will sing the song you were meant to sing, say the words that are written in your heart, and have more than you can ask or imagine. You will be loved and Loved.

I know I wouldn’t understand my sixty year old self anymore than my nine year old self would understand me, right now. But I’m sure, if we squinted just right, at the edges, where things either come together or blur, we would know what we meant.

mil besos,

rmg

ok, seriously...

so i ended my fast way before i wanted to do so. let's just say that events conspired against me, and although i am pretty tough, a five-day-long headache was really about all i could reasonably stand. i'll try it again, and this time will not be silent...not matter how gross it gets.



i just got back from having lunch with my friend doris, who is 83. for the first time, doris looked and acted really old today. she had trouble keeping up with the conversation, repeated a couple of things. she's never done that, before. and she wanted to talk about her funeral. needless to say, i came back to the office kind of sad. it's not that i mind talking to doris about her funeral...she's 83, and it's my job to plan funerals with people, or at least part of my job.

the thing is that, no matter how much i try and give up my ego in the middle of all of this, i mind thinking about how i'm going to feel without my twice-a-month visit to her. it's how i'm going to feel when i don't hear her tell me, "stay off the street, kid!" everytime i leave her house. it's how i'm going to feel when i know there will be no more random coffee mug gifts, given by her with such glee at the little dining table under the skylight. knowing that things could be getting close makes me nervous, makes it difficult for me to stay fully present with her, because what i want to do is start to get clinical, get focused on the details, put my heart away, and really get out my brain. but that would be the wrong thing.

that being said, this is incredibly hard. doris has been one of my buddies since the very beginning. even though i know that all things pass away, just as all things are being made new, my heart still kind of hurts a little bit.

mil besos,
rmg

you may be right, i may be crazy...

so today is my prep day before launching into a full on detox cleanse. i'm currently having a mug of hot chocolate and trying to decide what i want for lunch. this time tomorrow, i will be drinking super-special lemonade and water, a cup of mint tea each afternoon, a salt-water flush when i come home from work, and if i'm feeling extra adventurous, a nice hot cup of laxitive tea. stop freaking out. i will be getting all the calories i reasonably need, as well as plenty of vitamins and nutrients from the actual lemon juice and all the goodness God puts into grade b maple syrup and cayenne pepper. don't believe me? do some reading yourself, my dearies. it's good stuff.

you may be asking yourself at this point, a) why in the hell is she telling us all of this, and b) why in the hell would anyone do this to themselves? it sure can't be good.

the answer is that a) this is my blog. i've never really been one to keep things i think are weird, or fun, or interesting under wraps. also, i think doing something out of the ordinary, even if it is dietarily out of the ordinary, is worth sharing with people. it could also encourage people to do some of their own adventuring, and that's kind of cool. b) i don't so much look at it as doing it to myself, as i am doing it for myself. that sounds kind of dirty, but whatever...

the detox i'm doing is called "the master cleanse", and you can download the pdf on line, if you choose. it's very well documented and researched, and i beta tested it on myself before easter, to make sure it would work for me. i've made some modifications to fit my life, and i'm ready to do it for the real. during the beta test, there were some amazing moments of clarity, unlike any i have felt before, and i want to spend some more time in that head/heart space. i feel like it's pretty necessary for me at this point in the ball game. while things are going pretty well, at the moment, there are some thoughts i'd like to spend some concentrated time on, and since i'm not going to be able to vacation any time soon, this seems like the next best option.

also, and as much as i hate to admit it, but know i need to say it out loud, and please to God don't say anything about this part if you leave a comment because i just CAN'T bear to hear it...i am so sick of being the chubby girl with the great personality and giant brain who isn't getting asked out on dates. detox seems like a good way, the right way to start a real live major life-change. and if life really does begin at 30, i don't want to waste another minute.

mil besos,
rmg

clock watching

in three hours, i will be almost on my way home. by that time, i will have been at work for 13-almost 14 hours. the next two weeks are going to be insane...just really, really, really full. and there is really nothing i can do about it. you know, sometimes life is like the rinse cycle, and you just have to hold your breath until all the water stops rushing in, and you finally hit the spin cycle.

i think fixing up the back yard two weekends ago must have really shaken something loose. and it's been good to sit with all of that, and think about what it all means. i'm still trying to figure out some of it, but i think i'm coming to a point where i'm almost ready to talk about it out loud with you, internets.

and starting on thursday night, i'll be doing the Master Cleanse for the really real, and i'll be blogging about it over the course of my cleanse. i did a trail run last month, and feel like i'm really ready and maybe even called to do this for the really real. so, beware. the Master Cleanse is pretty intense, and i'll be giving you a very real, pretty uncensored look at what it means to me and my body. i won't be sending out daily reminders about the post on yahoo, so if you want to be reminded to read daily, update your rss feeds, or make a note.

i'm hoping the cleanse/fast will knock loose whatever the gardening missed. God is good, all the time.

mil besos,
rmg

how do she garden grow?

so this weekend, i spent several hours working on the back patio, which has been the most neglected part of my house since i bought it. this is what happened...

the more i do with the space i live in, the more it feels like some place i'd like to call home.

mil besos,

rmg

opposite day

when i worked at summer camp, our cook, Pappa Bear, decided i needed a nickname. unimpressed with the list of names i have been given by my friends and family (and it's a long, occasionally funny list), Pappa Bear insisted on coming up with his own, something uniquely descriptive, something all my own, something that everyone would know belonged only to me.



you know you have a special nickname at camp when Pappa Bear puts a name tag on your cup. i shouldn't have been suprised at breakfast during that second week when "Rachel" was replaced by "SNAFU" in all capital letters.



SNAFU is one of those charming phrases we've inheirited from the Marine Corps. since my poppy was a marine, i'd heard that phrase all my life. i was in college before i think i really knew what all the letters meant. i mean, i'd gotten the flavor of it even as a small child. SNAFU was something i lived. having that lovely phrase as my nickname only added another layer of irony to the cake.

SNAFU means that i have no idea what it's really like to be bored. i mean, i understand boredom on an emotional level...like last night, i couldn't find anything to do, my brain was so full that i was afraid blood was going to start running from my ears, but i couldn't bring myself to actually take a shower, dress, and go someplace. so, i sat on my bed and reworked part of a rug i've been making for the last five years. and i also watched "Celebrity Apprentice". this is shaming to me, because i really really really like this show. and i hate everything about this show. it's just so...messy and catty and horrible and so different from my little life that i literally will only pee during commercials, and i won't take phone calls. it's worse than watching "Days of Our Lives", which also embarassess me to admit to watching. i don't even want to think about how grammatically incorrect that last sentence was...

in dealing with things that aren't boring, i have to say that i really do have the market cornered. at least in my corner of the universe, i do. i'm sure i have nothing on the social workers who hang out downtown, or the er docs who pull lord-knows-what out of people's hoo-hoo's all day long, or mommies who get handfuls of frogs and rolly-polly's in their hands while cleaning out little pockets. but the freakshows i get to watch (and i say that with a lot of love in my ity-bity-tiny-coal-black-hard-heart) are pretty incredible. it's not what i imagined my life would look like at 30, but it is MY life, and even on days when it's hard, it's beautiful and i wouldn't trade it with anyone, for anything.

there are so many things going on in my head these days. it's hard to pin down which ones i want to talk about, which ones i want to ponder, which ones need to be wrapped in newsprint and packed away for a while, and which ones are just too far out of reach/sight to be reasonable. it's not that my brain is any more or less full than normal, i think it's just that i'm taking better stock of what's going on, what stuff means, why things move in cycles and waves, and how i'm doing at managing all of those things.

i've been with therapy mary for a year, now. i feel clearer than i've felt in a long time. it's not that a lot has changed since last year, because it hasn't, at least not on a macro level. but at the bottom of things, the volume seems to be turned down a little bit. instead of feeling like a substitute teacher walking into an algebra class full of hateful children who are all bent on breaking me, when i sit down to think about things, or when they creep into my head, i feel much more like a sweet, but semi-stern librarian, asking rowdy children to quiet down, so she can answer their questions about the card catalogue one at a time. maybe that's an odd analogy, but it works for me.

life is good.

mil besos,
rmg

all things considered

there's usually a lot going on in my head that i never say anything to anyone about. that's pretty true at the moment, as well. granted, if you added up the sum total of what each person in my life knows about me/what's going on, you'd have a pretty spot on idea of the whole picture.

what's going on in my head today is somewhere between white noise and primal scream. and i just can't make friends with it.


meh. the trash heap has spoken. expect a decent post later in the week.

mil besos,
rmg

rambling...

there's no picture for this post. i know, that's a departure from recent habit. i'm sure you will be just fine.

somehow, writing things here feels more purgative than writing in my journal. like it's not real unless i write it down for other people to see. i don't write the hard things as much as i should. i make it a habit to keep the deepest things away from other people, sometimes even from myself. but i'll tell you this...

i walk by it every day, at least twice a day, but more like six or seven times. i can't even bring myself to look at it, head on. the damn thing is so familar, even if i just catch it out of the corner of my eye, i can see every feature clearly. it mocks me with silence and emptiness. i know a thing is only a thing. and i know that this thing belongs to me, again for several very good reasons, not the least of which is that it is, in fact, mine. those facts notwithstanding, i am on the verge of outright hatred for this object. it mocks me with clean lines, hand rubbed spindles, sense-memories of long-forgotten meals.

i look at it and i force myself not to tear up. all the other stuff just like it, i have managed to wedge into a closet upstairs, in a room other than my own. i can avoid that stuff for months on end. i only kind of barely remember the stuff is there. but this thing won't fit into the space i've carved out for the rest of the artifacts. i can steel myself to have to grab something from that closet, or open it to put something into it. i can't seem to steel myself to walk through my kitchen every day, though. it's such a regular activity...you'd never imagine what a test of the will it can be to use the back door, and not run out the front door, just to avoid seeing my high chair.

that's right. MY high chair. i used it. there are photos of me sound asleep slumped over it's tray. my brother used it. my nephew even sat in it, once or twice. but every time i see that thing, all i can see are the faces of the children i see only in my sleep.

mil besos,
rmg

hands

i have never liked my hands. i have been trying to make peace with that since i was a little girl.

i know that's an especially silly thing for a woman to say, so typical of early 21st century female insecurities. there's a book called "i feel bad about my neck", so i guess it's chic and accepatable for me to feel bad about my hands.

my mother, my grandmothers, my aunt, my fairy god-mothers, my friends...all of them have beautiful hands. even the men in my life have lovely hands. for the longest time, everytime i looked at my hands, i was disappointed in them, disappointed in myself. my hands were a reflection of what i felt about my whole self...so close to being good, but not actually good, at all. i looked at them and all i could see were the improvements that needed to be made, the things that had slipped through them, the things they had broken that could not be mended, or lost and couldn't be found.

i used to get in so much trouble when i was little for being messy, for losing things, for not keeping track of things, for going too fast and messing things up, for not putting things away. i track it all back to my hands. i have made every effort to put away that messy child, to get all the barbie wash-off nail polish washed off her ragged cuticles. she still peeks out from time to time, and rolls her eyes when i make my bed in the mornings. she also has a real problem with the weekly dusting, almost ritualized in it's pattern every saturday. i suppose there was a time when she was sure that all that activity, all the mess would cover up how she really felt about herself, and her hands. now, i try to clean up all the mess, keep it neat and tidy, so maybe no one will notice that my hands are too big, too hot, too efficient.

i am not one of those people who can just have fun...it makes me feel guilty, and nervous that the bottom is about to fall out. i know, i know, i'm supposed to trust God, my fellow humans, etc. who doesn't have fun, right? here's the thing...i can only let myself have fun and enjoy something if i feel like i'm contributing to society, being taught a lesson, or teaching a lesson. i know, it's sick. this is why (ok, it's one of the reasons why) i see a therapist regularly. anyway, i usually extend the "it's not just a fun ride" principle into my work life, as well. and that is how i ended up with my hands (the hands i cannot make myself learn to like or love) full of mysterious red dirt inside a very small church in an even smaller town in a remote part of new mexico.

i am fascinated by miracles...not just the healings, although they are paramount. i love the stories that go with the miracles. stories about mundane things, ordinary people, every day heartbreak seem to collide with grace, mercy, angels, and (like aeschylus said to agammemnon) the awful grace of God. i had been fascinated by miracle shrines like lourdes, fatima, and chimayo for years before i ever thought about visiting one of the sites. but i found myself organzing a trip for some of the kids i used to work with around chimayo and the santa fe ski area. see...fun and work.

so i took the children skiing. and i took them to the loretto chapel in santa fe. we prayed. we shopped. we ate alot. the kids liked the skiing. they moaned and groaned the day i told them we weren't going up the mountain, we were going around it.

we talked about miracles that day, for a long time. i told them the story of chimayo, which you can read here: http://chimayo.org/history.html they seemed sort of underwhelmed, but were willing to go along with me, because i knew where all the snacks were. we talked about whether we believed in miracles, what constituted a miracle, why miracles do or don't happen depending on the situation, etc. they were smart kids. once we got to the church, the kids were getting quiet, doing their own thinking, preparing themselves to be still and do some thinking. i was very proud of them.

and so, we ended up inside this lovely little church, wandering through, saying our prayers, thinking thoughts to ourself, not really whispering or anything. and all of a sudden, we were in front of this little hole in the ground, full of the most beautiful red dirt i had ever seen. i remember feeling this overwhelming compulsion to put my hands in the dirt and rub it across my palms, through my fingers, up to my wrists, like i was washing my hands. so that's what i did. other pilgrims had brought little baggies or boxes to take home dirt from this little hole. the dirt is supposedly the vehicle of miraculous healings that have taken place at chimayo...healings, pregnancies, relief from pain, etc. the walls of the little room with the little hole are decorated with old crutches, wheels from wheelchairs, pictures of babies. and so there i stood, all of 25 years old, still with so much to learn and see and do, with two handfuls of red dirt, staring blankly at a pair of hands that really no longer looked like mine, no longer looked detestable to me.

i brushed the excess dirt off my hands, put them to my face, and breathed in the earthy aroma of that glorious red dirt. i exited the little room with the little hole, i looked at my palms, and they were glittering...quartz in the dirt...diamond dust...miracles happen every day.

nothing has been the same since. i look at my hands, at what they are doing, and i try to make it good, make it an offering. we have so much to do, and such a little time to do it, and i don't want to be careless with a single minute, don't want to pass up a minute of joy or learning, don't want to miss a sunrise or a sunset because i'm off doing something piddly and small. i don't want to miss doing something incredible because i'm worried about how my hands will look, or what kind of mess might get made.

i look at my hands now, knowing full well there is not a shred of dirt left on them from that early spring day. i think about how the red dirt filled in the lines and rings on my palm and finger tips, and how that moment, staring at my hands, felt like a thousand years, how i could feel the life in the dirt flowing into my hands, getting me ready for something new. if i close my eyes and think of early spring in the mountains, that is what i remember. i know i picked up something important that day. i am still trying to find out how to put it to use.

thanks be to God.

mil besos,

rmg

don't...

don't panic. i am just taking a little break to stir up some new stories for you guys. if anyone is still even reading this...

mil besos,
rmg

blessed among women

Ode to Veiled Women

Oh! My Sisters…so many of you faceless, wordless, nameless, blessed, and veiled.
As you see the world around you through the blue haze of the veil,
do you ever wonder what you are missing?
Do you ever stop to think that the world is missing you?

You, my sister, who sees only that which is in front of her, never to the sides, and never behind…
do you stop to mourn what you are missing,
do you know that you’re only getting one third of the picture?

Does it make you angry that God made you a girl?
Does it make you angry that even though God made you a girl,
Man made you a veiled woman?

Do you wonder what the wind would feel like on your whole face,
raising your dampened hair and wilted spirit?
When was the last time you raised your whole face,
your whole head, your whole self,
naked and unashamed into the bright Sun of the afternoon,
glowing like the mother of all creation?
Are you even allowed to think of that?

Oh! My Sisters…so many of you faceless, wordless, nameless, blessed, and veiled.
Your eyes were opened a long time ago.
You know that you are missing nothing.
Child of the West: this world misses nothing you cast forth.

You, my sister, who sees everything in a three-hundred-sixty degree scope of present, past, and future…
You only mourn what you can’t imagine.
You never stop to think about what could be hiding under the rocks, waiting for you to slow down.

It never occurred to you to blame God for making you a girl.
It never occurred to you to blame God for making you a girl, because your fathers and your brothers agreed you could be anything you wanted to be.

Do you wonder what mountains there are left to climb?
Have you had enough of shaving your legs, painting your eyes black,
cutting your hair just so, smoking because you can?
Do you see yourself mother-naked in the mirror, or do you only see
What you have hidden in all of this creation?
Do you allow yourself to think of that?

I think about you, Fatima:
Daughter of the Prophet.
Mother of God.
Small child of Piedras, with her brown face upturned in my hands.
You have so many faces.
So many faces.
And they are all beautiful, behind all of the veils that we wear, for all of the reasons we wear them.

Yes, the faces are beautiful.
Even mine.

mil besos,

rmg

and now, for something completely different...

The rest of this piece said something about “at the front of your jeans”. I’m not sure I want to know what that means. Regardless, it’s an interesting question. “How big is the gap?” Which gap—gender, wage, generation, intelligence, socio-economic? There are gaps everywhere: small and large, profound and mundane, the truest definitions of the agony and the ecstasy.

There are gaps we don’t even see but that make themselves known in our daily lives. When I talk to an older person—either of my grandmothers, my grandfather, the old couples at my church, etc. , the gap I notice the most is between what I say and what they hear. I find myself having to modulate the pitch for my voice, the correct volume of speech, weeding out colloquialisms that they will not understand, being plain in my expressions. I wonder what the gap looks like from their end… how frustrating it must be to talk to me if I am over-excited, or get confused about which ear their hearing aid is in, or use the slang I pick up from my crazy friends. That must be hard for them.

I think about the gap between what happens and what might have happened, sometimes. The further you get away from a pivot point, the harder it becomes to really imagine how things might have been if that one pivotal point had occurred at a different place or in a different way. For the first few months after my dad died, I would imagine how things would have been if he had lived…trips home, holidays, conversations. But the further I get away from being 18, sense of relief or comfort I get from pretending or imagining that things were different becomes smaller and smaller. There is no point in trying to script out a conversation between my father and I as adults, about anything. It’s to the point now that it’s not even fun to think about, because it’s so far-fetched. Giving that up, walking past that gap, and not filling it with conversations that won’t happen, has been good, I think…profoundly hard, but good.

I think there is a gap between parents and children that is particularly important. There comes a time in early adulthood when I think you realize that there is a difference, no matter how small, between who you are as your parents’ child, and who you are in the world. My friends and I talk about this a lot. Sometimes, there’s this huge sense of betrayal in the children. Who am I to be anything other than what my parents have been telling me I am? Who am I to tell my parents “No”? Even my toddler-aged nephew knows not to tell his mother and father “no”. I imagine it’s hard for a parent to come to the realization that you will never fully know your child, not any more than you child will every fully know you. And I think that’s true, regardless of how close the parent/child relationship is. Coming to grips with that is vital. Ignoring that gap in knowledge, intimacy, authenticity just creates an atmosphere of thievery…parents robbing children of the right to grow up, children robbing their parents of the right to see the fruits of their labor.

I just got back from a weekend with two of my dearest friends. We try to spend at least one weekend together every year. Time has been our gap…the time between DC, Austin, St. Louis, New Orleans, New Braunfels, Durham, San Antonio. We have filled up the time between when we all lived together and last weekend with all sorts of experiences, other people, other houses, other friends. But, as in all transcendental friendships, the gap narrows to nothing when we are back in the presence of each other, the entity we call “us”. We lapse easily back into our rhythms of speech, our friendship roles, the way we all sit squished together on the couch to watch a movie, when we would probably be just as comfortable in other chairs or on the floor. You can believe that the gap is almost gone…just a hint of air in the middle of things.

Caroline’s poor husband always takes the invasion of his space with such grace. I promised I would try to find him a boyfriend to play with. Then, I realized that a boyfriend wouldn’t be enough to bring with me, next time. Adding partners into the equation of friendship is pretty easy to do, assuming you like the partner. Melissa and I love Caro’s husband, Alex. He’s a prince among men. He makes Caro sparkle. He has also made Caro a mother. And that, friends and neighbors, is something holy. There is nothing better than your friend telling you, after years of worry and not knowing and doubting and praying, that she is having a baby. I cried with happiness. But a little part of me was sad, too. A little tiny, awful, horrible, nasty, mean, selfish part of me cried because this changes everything, and not like getting married changed everything.

Partners can be left at home for long weekends. Partners can leave the house for a run, or errands, or to go beer-drinking with their own good friends. Partners can go to bed and read while you stay up and talk into the wee hours. Babies can do none of those things. Babies go with you everywhere. Babies are with you all the time. Babies are magnificent. Babies are breathtakingly gorgeous. Babies make me insanely jealous. There…I said it.

That being said, I can’t wait until the day that child makes her entrance into the world. I would be happy to never spend another weekend with my girls if it meant that the new little girl could have five more minutes learning about the exceptional creature that is her mother, and the repository of patience that belongs behind her father’s eyes.

The gap is necessary…the gap is the lost tooth of our 20’s, to be filled in with the tiny pearls of child-rearing wisdom. The gap is knowing that my couch-surfing days, cris-crossing the country on frequent flyer miles, going on adventures during school holidays and long weekends is rapidly coming to a close. Life moves on. 11pm becomes staying up late. Work can consume. Gym dues beckon you to stay one more hour.

The gap is that space between being asleep and awake, where you can see the face of the ones you love, and hear their voices, and know that eventually, all the gaps close. And you always end up right where you were meant to be.

mil besos,

rmg

word about the scenery...

the christmas blog is coming, for sure. remember, i officially have 12 days to get it done, and i'm pacing well. in between trying to remember what all has happened over the last 12 months (and good Lord, has it been full!) i've been to the rio grande valley, done all my shopping and wrapping in less than 8 hours, planned a visit to the zoo, eaten some sub-par chinese food, bought milk at the grocery store, planned a small (but VERY fun) pajama party for NYE, cleaned the house, done laundry, and sort of showed up to work. one day, i will learn to rest on my time off. this is not that day, my peeps...this is not that day.

i have a picture of michelangelo's lybian sybil on the top of this blog. it's not just some arbitrary piece of classic art, although it is a classic. no, the lybian sybil is my absolute favorite painting of all time. suprising, huh? bet you thought it would be van gogh's "iris" or "starry night", or the chagall piece with the bride and the goat...maybe even da vinci's "madonna of the rocks"...or something by kandinsky, like the color study with the squares and the circles, which i do love, because somehow all my water colors end up looking like a cheap knock-off of that one painting. but no...it's the lady in the toga, high up on the ceiling of the sistine chapel that is my favorite of favorites. she is a master painting...but that's not why i love her.

i love that painting. i love that painting because i want to be that lady, minus the over-developed calves and weird hair-do. she looks so strong and confindent. ultimately capable, utterly composed, still and yet in motion, the epitome of multi-tasking, the definition of grace under pressure. i keep her on the screen saver of my computer, so that when i begin my work day, i am thinking about projecting that kind of calm and action. the lybian sybil and the baby jesus keep me focused and grounded during the day...they remind me of who i want to be, and what i need to do to get there.

mil besos,
rmg

oh geeze...

oh internets...it's been a bumpy couple of weeks inside my head.

long story short-- i am fine. the universe gave me a huge pass, all things considered, and for that, i am one very grateful, adamantly NOT dating a total butthole (two words: press shots...), cookie-avoiding, Christmas-shopping-procrastinating, ironed and starched, thirty year old on her way to a greater understanding of a lot of things.

i can't believe it's the third week in advent. holy smokes...

mil besos,
rmg

cold weather...free association...stream of thought...speed of light

it's just cold enough...you can smell the winter on the wind, if it blows just right. makes me think about going hunting with my poppy. i know hunting with me wasn't nearly as much fun as with my brother or my dad or his friends, but i was always excited to go with him. looking was so much fun when i knew what i was looking for...turkey, deer, whatever. i wish i knew what i was looking for or looking at right now. the sides of the picture are clear, but the foreground and the middle is blurry and so out of focus, i can hardly stand to look right at it.



we used to ride out to deer camp in the old blue bronco. that car was magic and smelled like adventure. all i can smell right now is adrinaline, and i have to will myself not to get into the car and just start driving, with the top down and the heater blasting, trying to find the right perspective from which to view what's going on in a real way. it's totally different, and totally the same. i'd read tea leaves, but i'm too tired to go make the tea. water seems like it takes hours to boil, and i swear i have a million thoughts a minute, so maybe it's not hours, after all. maybe the blur isn't really all that bad, and i'm just being a drama queen about it.

i vacillate between total certainty that i am right and the knowledge that i am absolutely wrong. if i thought it would do any good, i would bang my head against the brick wall downstairs, just to knock something or anything loose. and then i remind myself that i am a grownup. this is what i bargained for. yes, this is what i bargained for, running myself ragged, dragging myself along on the ground, knees bloodied and eyes red, all these years...

things, whether they change now, or change later, or are even in the process of changing, are going to have to change, at some point. all this independence i've been socking away, being so proud of, all the time by myself with nothing to be louder than my thoughts and the purring of the cat, all the things i demanded i could and would do by myself...all of it...i am willing and ready to open it up and share it, and along some lines, even radically change it. and that is scary. the scariest part is that it doesn't bother me in the least. i'm even ready for it, at least in theory. giving up all nighters to ironing, or cooking bizarre dinners, doing laundry whenever i choose to do it, grocery shopping twice a month, spending hours on the phone, going when and where i please when and where i please, watching the same movie three times in a row, or leaving a whole album on repeat for a solid week...the little things that remind me that i live alone and am single...i am slowly packing them up into boxes, and putting them into a closet. slowly.

lord, have mercy.

mil besos,
rmg

what dreams may come

"the only difference between empty hands and open hands is attitude"

--paraphrased from G-d Calling

do you ever have those dreams where someone asks you the hardest, most bizarre question you've ever been asked, and the minute you try to blurt out the answer, it gets caught in your throat, and even though you are screaming at the top of your lungs, you just kind of make this really pathetic "mmmmmphhhhhblarglemmmmmph" sound? just me... whatever, you people are full of it...you've totally had that dream, and you know it. and if not, i hope you have it tonight, so you can sympathize.

i haven't had that dream in months. no, lately, that's what waking life has felt like. and not in a bad way...really, not at all. actually, things are going quite well. i feel like i am using my real voice, saying true things, making good on my answers. my yes means yes, and my no means no. this is a good place to be. and looking back on it, i have been here a lot longer than i thought. i spent hours the other night going over old journals, seeing the progress, the regressions, the slow climb out of austin, and everything after. i am profoundly grateful...for all of it. it's like the song "no ceiling" is playing on a continuous loop in my head. eddie vedder said it best, "this love has no ceiling". and despite my penchant for waiting on shoes to drop, i am findng myself relaxing back into this...and i am utterly unafraid.

that's the thougth i keep coming back around to...this profound gratitude. i feel like an exclamation point, all the way down to my toes, which today are firmly housed in my favorite steve madden high heels. i know that's what you're supposed to do before thanksgiving...make your list, focus your intentions, put gas in the car, etc. but i found myself feeling all these feelings weeks ago, totally unbidden. like i woke up one day, and this veil had been lifted from my eyes...nothing had changed, but everything was different. no new people...no new routine...nothing out of the ordinary had spurred this. it simply was, or is, i suppose. and again, i am just profoundly grateful for everything, everyone, all of it, even if tomorrow, everything is different. these moments, this time and space, have been immense and amazing, like my own little central park in the middle of the madness of the manhattan that is my brain.

mil besos,

rmg

nostaligia: she's a beast.

i remember standing there, in the coldest rain i can remember, singing with pete seeger at the top of my lungs. my roommate mike had come home three days before, and with not too much arm-twisting, convinced me to take a bus ride to someplace in georgia i'd never even heard of. considering that i worked for a bunch of hippie liberals, getting friday and monday off was a snap. explaining to my family that i was leaving dc for the weekend, in the company of total strangers, except for mike, who was a stranger to them, was kind of hard sell. telling your conservative momma and grandparents that you are going to attend a protest at a high profile military installation is a ticklish kind of thing to do. i suppose they just shook their heads, said a prayer, and figured it was something i needed to get out of my system.

what i didn't know about geopolitics, even after graduating from college with a minor in political science, could have filled the grand canyon. i spent my time in college reading about the rise of empire, the devine right of kings, and aristotelian political theory. i spent very little time in the modern era...and the time i did spend there, i spent reading about the palestinian/israeli conflict. i was guilty, according ts eliot, of neglecting and belittling the desert that lay in my own back yard. and i was coming into my adulthood at a time when that desert was filled with voices crying in the wilderness, begging for someone to listen. i was 21 when the big protests at the imf and world bank happened, happily ensconced in my little life in san marcos, trying to finish my degree, and swealtering through another texas summer. i remember seeing the protests on tv, and changing the channel to "behind the music"...sometimes you just can't stand to see the reality that is staring you back in the face.

by the time i got to dc, in the summer of 2000, 12 days after i graduated from college, the tenor of the conversation, the realization that things were happening that i had no idea about, knocked me for a loop. as a person, i was just really coming into my own...moving away from home was just the tip of the ice berg. i think most people come to a point in their young adult lives when they realize that they are no longer simply their parents' child, they have become something beyond that. i was, and still am, profoundly proud to be my parents' child. but my identity isn't nearly as wrapped up in that persona as it was when i was 21. things have happened, i have seen things, done things, been a part of things that have happened far from the reach of their hands, physical and metaphorical. those things have shaped me as much as the time i spent in their house. and i am equally grateful for both. that being said, i think most people go through a time in their lives when they stand everything they thought they knew and believed on its head...and you see what sticks.

what stuck for me was remembering that i grew up in a house that believed in God. i grew up in a house that believed in the goodness of people, that believe how you treated people mattered, that even nasty people deserved to be treated well. i never believed that the world was a fair place, but i learned that i could deal fairly with people, and that made all the difference. i learned that standing up for the right, true, and good things is hard, but necessary, and that the licks you take for doing that are always worth it, no matter the cost. i learned that the measure of a person isn't about what's in your bank account, but what's in your heart and what comes out of your mouth. and so, as i felt myself thinking all these big thoughts, wrestling with issues i'd never contemplated, i had a good foundation to build upon.

and so i went to georgia...to find out what i did not know. i wasn't silly enough to believe that the story i heard in georgia was the gospel truth about what was happening in latin america. history is rarely unbiased, regardless of whether it is written by the victors or the victims. but i knew i wanted to know a different part of the story. to be honest, i felt like a charlatan, a voyeur, an interloper. here i was, a middle class kid with a middle class education, who didn't even know if she was a republican or a democrat, who didn't know anything about the sandinistas, or the contras, or nicaragua, or archbishop romero, and i was smack in the middle of a discussion of all those things. i remember being silent for so much of the time i was there...just taking it all in, reading pamphlet after pamphlet, trying to make sense of what i was reading. and i felt like so...unfaithful. both my grandfathers and one of my grandmothers had been in the military. my uncle was in the navy. my greatgrandfather fought in wwi, and i had been taught my whole life to be patriotic, to support the troops, to be reverent almost. and here i was, standing in the middle of a cold fall rain, in protest at a military base. to say that i was conflicted would be an understatement of gigantic proportions. and i still feel conflicted.

what i do know is this...i have a profound and deep sense of respect and admiration and gratitude for the men and women in the armed forces. they keep us safe. they are volunteers. they leave me breathless with their selflessness in the face of incredibly difficult circumstances. they don't get to vote about where they go or what they do. they are so incredibly brave. and they deserve to have policies that reflect that bravery and honor. and i believe to this day that the policy i was protesting deserved that protest, on their behalf, because they could not do it themselves.

i'm not going to write a diatribe about how awful the school of the americas is. i'm not going to go off on some rant about how crappy governmental subterfuge is, or why i think the geneva accords are subverted in the name of national security or global stabilization. those things are a matter of public record, and the proof of the pudding is written in miles of newsprint. and i'm sure the school of the americas has graduated some upstanding and decent people, and that the instructors there are not all cyborgs with lumps of coal where their hearts should be. what i am going to say is that america deserves better. our men and women in the field, sleeping cold and hungry in the name of freedom and peace, deserve better. i pray that we are coming to a time when we can say that, demand that, and achieve that.

as i stood in the rain, chain smoking camel cigarettes and listening to speaker after speaker talking about mid-night raids in el salvador, nuns and priests murdered for standing up to political juntas, men and women who had been kidnapped and tortured for disagreeing with their own governments, i found myself marveling at the wonder of my own government. we have come so far...we still have so far to go.

so, as i sit on my little balcony, on a mild november night, i remember. and i hope.

mil besos,
rmg

a real barn-burner...

What you are, the world is.

And without your transformation,

there can be no transformation of the world.

--j. krishnamurti

you know, turning 30 was pretty major, grey hair aside. the weight of the experience isn't lost on me. i hate to say it, but part of me really, really, really embraces this new era in my life. and i say that without a trace of irony. and another part of me just hopes i am up to the challenge.

i guess i imagined that turning 30 would provide me with some automatic wisdom that i wouldn't have to try so hard to attain, or that things that bothered me would suddenly seem so trivial that i would never think about them, ever again. that's not the case at all. things have been so bizarre in my head lately, i'm feeling kinship with my 15 year old self again, and that is more disconcerting than i'm willing to admit at the moment.

i realize i'm sounding cryptic. and i don't intend to sound that way. i'm just finding myself incredibly frustrated lately. the real kicker is that i'm actually NOT the problem. and i am dealing with my absolute powerlessness in the face of a lot of things, at the moment. YAY. i love those lessons.

shit. someone pass me the asprin. and that bottle of vodka from the freezer.

mil besos,

rmg

godless heathen...table for one?

this is me. this is me trying to explain that i'm just one girl, with one vote. this is me trying to break out of molds, have discourse, and be an active participant in conversations with people i love. this is me being catergorized, polled, ingested, and spit out into raw data, polished numbers, and focus groups. this is me being told what i think, what i don't think, what i like, what i don't like by millions of people every day. this is me.

i have to be honest with you. i am, for all intents and purposes, a liberal. it took me years to own that. i still say it with fear and trembling, because i know the judgement that title brings with it. i know what people say about liberals. and i'll tell you, for me, almost none of it is true. but people, even people close to me, insist on sending me emails, news articles, clips, etc. that tell me what and how i am, as a liberal. i hate that. i really, really hate it. i hate it so much that i've spent the last thirty minutes trying not to cry over an article that ended up in my inbox less than two hours ago. i feel a constant need to explain and explain and explain that while i do support liberal causes, and tend to vote in a liberal fashion, i am my own person. and i feel like i have been mostly very circumspect and quiet about my feelings in this last election, to the point that i am in all out avoidance of all things political with about half the people i know. this isn't because i don't want to have the conversations. it's because every time the conversation is broached, i end up feeling like i'm not only defending my political convictions, i'm defending my right to have any feelings and convictions at all, because, as a liberal, i'm not supposed to have any thoughts or feelings of my own outside the party line, right?

wrong.

let me be clear about this...i am tired...sick, tired, and really overwhelmed with being told "what i am" because of the way i choose to vote. that is not the measure of me as a person. that is not what i think G-d sees when G-d looks at me. i know it's certainly not what i see. not by a long shot.

i am not a godless heathen. i actually really love Jesus...to the point that i work for Him, as my primary job. i don't think that all republicans hate poor people, or believe that GWB is the root of all evil, or in every conspiracy theory that comes down the pipe. i don't think that you have to live in new york or los angeles or washington, dc to have a decent idea. i don't buy into the liberal elite idea that if you didn't go to college, you aren't worth talking to. i don't want to keep the poor uneducated, and stupid, and strung out on welfare.

i don't want a huge government. i do want more personal responsibility. i do think that truth and values are important--i think that truth and values are so important that i wish we had a constitutional ammendment allowing for a vote of no confidence, because we deserve the right to call "no joy" in the middle of the game, just as much as any european country does. i think that it's ridiculous to talk about a culture of life and still support the death penalty, meanwhile ignoring the health crisis that looms for american children, who bear no responsibility for the financial or political choices of their parents. i support faith-based initiatives to act on behalf of communities, rather than creating governmental agencies to do the same jobs. i think that a fair day's work deserves a fair day's wage, and that the market determines what is fair. i think that we have to be innovative, creative, and reconciling in our attempts to make new discoveries and continue to explore technologies we already have in hand. i think that most people agree on most things, they just can't shut up long enough to come to that point.

in this last week of campaigning, before this historic election, please remember to vote! please remember to say thank you to our men and women in uniform who make it possible for us to live in a country where we have the right to vote. and be nice to the g-dless heathens...we sometimes are halfway decent people, who aren't bent on total world domination.

mil besos,

rmg

contemplative wednesday

In our life there is a single color as on an artist palette, which provides the meaning of life and art...
It is the color of love.

—marc chagall

one of my little old guys died last week, on thursday. he had moved to sonoma to live with his niece last february. he had big blue eyes, always wore a turquoise ring, smoked like a fiend, and had a little pug dog named "doc". he woke up on wednesday to see if his social security check had cleared. he told his niece to tell me thank you for the card i'd sent him the week before (the picture and quote are at the top of this post), and to tell me he was sorry he'd missed my birthday. and then, he died. i cried like a little kid when my boss told me that story. i still kind of want to cry, thinking about it. alan was a wonderful person, a dear man, someone with a lot of love in his heart, and so many stories to tell. i am so glad i got to know him.

i'm listening to a lot of music lately, even for me, and i listen all the time, to a pretty big variety of stuff. here's what's on the mix today... it is definately as random as it looks. but it's good, oddly enough, kind of shockingly good. and my mind is going in about 80 different directions today...so, this is kind of a sound salve, i guess.

Syrup & Honey 3:20 Duffy Rockferry

Drown 8:20 Smashing Pumpkins

Nebraska 4:34 Bruce Springsteen

Call It A Day 3:37 The Raconteurs

Ashokan Farewell 5:11 Nashville Chamber Orchestra

Evangeline 3:13 The Band with Emmylou Harris

Lady Margret 3:02 Cassie Franklin

Storms Are On The Ocean 3:24 June Carter Cash

The Dreaming Tree 8:48 Dave Matthews Band

Everyday 2:25 Don McLean

Red Dirt Girl 4:18 Emmylou Harris

I'm Yours 4:03 Jason Mraz

Myriad Harbour 4:00 The New Pornographers

Atlantic City 4:03 Bruce Springsteen

Travelling 3:34 Joni Mitchell

Mack The Knife 3:24 Louis Armstrong

Autumn 2:50 Paolo Nutini

Florida 5:01 Patty Griffin

Desire 3:41 Ryan Adams

Fly Me To The Moon 4:01 Tony Bennett

With Or Without You 4:56 U2

mil besos,

rmg