Simply

“Help me to simply live”

This is the last line of the journal entry I just made. I am shedding something. Something complicated. Shedding some false sense of self, of security, of pride. I realize that this means that a lot will change. I’ve been waiting for it. Expecting it. Afraid of it, and excited for it all at the same time. Maybe this is the Kingdom of God being birthed in me. I’m ready for it. I am pregnant with Hope. Maybe I have been all this time. Maybe its time for her to be born. For Hope to become a substance in my life. Hope is the very thing I have hoped for. For a reason outside of myself to live, for something to give my heart over to.

So here it is. The change of my life, to carry and foster Hope inside of me so that others can meet Her. To let her be alive.

Excerpts from Galatians 4.
But when the time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under law, to redeem those under law, that we might receive the full rights of sons. Because you are sons, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, the Spirit who calls out, "Abba, Father." So you are no longer a slave, but a son; and since you are a son, God has made you also an heir…My dear children, for whom I am again in the pains of childbirth until Christ is formed in you…Get rid of the slave woman and her son, for the slave woman's son will never share in the inheritance with the free woman's son." Therefore, brothers, we are not children of the slave woman, but of the free woman.

panelled room

It's not what it sounds. Or maybe it is exactly as it sounds. I am living in a fully panelled room right now. For the next few days as things are being rearranged in my new house I'm downstairs in a room that is floor to ceiling (and ceiling) panelling. It smells like fir to me. I could be wrong. My nose is off these days.

Upstairs if the doors are open it smells like cedar. The ocean must be tied to every molecule of cedar because when it's wet it smells like the salty air when you get close to the ocean. I'd forgotten how the trees up here retain that salty smell.

I must admit: I'm a chicken.

lines

The lines on my face say more than I would like them to some times. There has been a gradual downward shift in the shape of my mouth over my years here in Kansas City. I noticed it a few months ago and wondered about it. What had changed in me so much that caused my whole face to be more attracted by gravity than it used to be? I don't laugh as much as I used to.

My friend Kristen told me that my contagious laughter made me bearable, because I am so melancholy the rest of the time. But when I laugh, the whole world laughs with me. I don't want to lose that part of myself. I have felt this last year in Kansas City weigh on me more than any other year I've lived here. I've become serious. And I guess I am sort of torn between serious and "grown up". I'm not that comfortable with being "grown up", and truth be told I pretty much suck at the refinements of it, i.e. suitable conversation for parties, making people comfortable when you first meet them, etc. Neither am I comfortable with being serious, in general. I guess I can't help but make jokes at every turn, sometimes it becomes compulsive, and I can't turn it off.

There is this new person I met. A brother of a friend of mine, and I don't know what my problem is, but I keep attacking, I keep pushing, and making combative verbal gestures. I don't mean it! I don't want to do it! Why can't I just be a normal 27 year old female that can "be", and not act like a threatened little 12 year old. I really like this guy, he is hilarious, doesn't deserve my abuse. Don't get me wrong. He said: "sarcasm is my love language", so he is sort of asking for it.

I am a witty and charming person. I enjoy being with people, especially funny people. There is a switch that flips, less now than when I was younger, and turns me into this bitch-machine that become inarticulate and combative, reduced to cussing and crude hand signals. WHO IS THAT? The worst version of myself, that's for sure!


This is me right before I moved to Kansas City. My dad was taking pictures of me and my best friend Missy. I don't even remember what we were laughing about.

I miss the people in my life that make me laugh like this. They have all moved away, and I will never live in the same city as them again. I hate that about life. I'm sorry but I do. It just makes me want to get to heaven all the more. I have a great theory that when we get to heaven (after a millennium of freaking out at how beautiful God really is) we will have these private screening rooms of different events in history. There is going to be a whole room of "funniest moments" and I will be howling and rolling on the ground with Jesus at some of these moments in my life and in other peoples lives. At least there I won't have to worry about peeing my pants.

This is a list(not comprehensive) of the funniest people I know, in no particular order:
Jeremiah Gonda
Jeremiah LaCoille
Amber Fannin
Heather Ayres
Gretchen Bourquin
Bret Bourquin
Rachel Liegghio
Samuel Sullivant
Colin Walker
Jason Henderson
Luke Sullivant
Joel Sorge
Prestidge Boys (I'm assuming the ones I haven't met are just as funny)
David Blackwell
Adam Short
Sarah Cox
Pamela Merwin
Kristen Curry
Tikva Twomey
Shannon Vinson
Gabriel Kellmer
Alissa Parker
Nate Haas
Greg Buckman
Jesse Robertson
Donald Carter
Jim Walker
Linda Walker
Missy Lee
Karen Stacey
David Rosen
Chris Dupre and Gary Wiens (together)
Stuart Graves
Leah Morgan

this is a short list of people that have made my life more bearable by making me laugh hysterically at least a few times, enough for me to consider them funny.

Best of all. Anna Walker. I make myself laugh more than anyone knows.

a whole lot I don't know about yet

Man and Wife, just say it, Man and Wife...

They never said, "I do".
richer, poorer, in sickness and in health, thick and thin, babies, death, lies and forgiveness...however it goes.

I am disturbed. I have become accutely aware of the lack of followthrough in relationship lately. I don't know how I am going to say all of this, I apologize for it's roughness.

I have cried over my friends marriages more in the last week then I have ever thought possible. For the first time I am seeing with differant eyes the lies that we are brought up believing are truths. And as I watch the unravelling effect that reality has on real life marriages it makes me sick.

Ideals. Optimisim, "hope", "faith", all these words that might describe someone who is nieve enough to think that the princess gets her prince and they live happily ever after.

Let me state: I am getting the cynisim knocked out of me right now, even as I attempt to write some thoughts about this. It all started last week after I watched the interaction of a married couple that I know in front of all these people at thier daughters birthday party. I ached inside when I left. I groaned. I got angry. I began spouting poison about how marriage never works and how its all a big sham from the beginning. God never meant it to work out, it was just pain and brokenness magnified. As I was spewing these vile lies I felt deep inside of me this tug to go to Jesus about it and repent for accusing God of not being good.

I broke down in my car. drapped over my steering wheel weeping, repenting for taking the imperfect and blaming God for it. I set my heart to live and not to take in the poison that I had been from my childhood watching my own broken parents struggle with what marriage was.
I think something changed inside of me. I think that God flipped a switch in me. I prayed for mercy on my friends who were hurting each other. I begged God to protect them and to show himself to them.

a day later, on my birthday, my friend got a phone call from her boyfriend and he broke up with her, stating something like insanity for his case. (thank you very much for your perfect timing) And it began to strike me that something is wrong. Something is very, very wrong. I had an appointment with my counsellor on my birthday and it was something we talked about. About marriage and relationships, etc. and the piece of massive truth that has since been totally unravelling me was this: At the moment of seeing sin (someone procreating sin in someone elses life, etc.) there are two options for a response. The first, being the godly one, is that you can see the situation as it is, feel the impact of sin and fallenness in people's lives and grieve, with Jesus, about it...which often times I have discovered leads into intercession for those people/that situation. The second, being the ungodly response, is that you take what you see and you swallow it whole as "life experiance", and you let it sink deep into you. Usually this produces a deep anger and rage about the unfairness of life, about the seeming lack of God's providentual hand in our lives, and worst of all it becomes a part of you in deep levels that you don't understand and you begin to create a world view around these things you percieve as truth, and cynisim sets in. Oh the depths of depravity that need Jesus!

I have done this my WHOLE life up to now! It has literally mutilated my body, interfered with my relationships, with family, with my hopes for the future, and I haven't trusted God because of MY persceptions of a situtation (as though I have the ENTIRE picture!).

Since I ran face first into this wall of truth I've literally become a ball of mush. You could poke me and I would probably start crying. I've known for a long time that grief (and my avoidence of it) was a big part of my healing, and now it is as if the perverbial snowball has begun its decent down a snowy mountian.

The amazing thing to me about all of this is how absolutly freeing it is. In the moments that I have been faced with the choice of whether to grieve about something or get cynical and I choose greif, I have experianced such an amazing lightness of heart afterward. It is as though I do not carry it, whereas, every other time in the past because of my ungodly responses I've become the bearer of a burden that was never mine in the first place.

As I said before, this is all very rough, which I guess everything I write is. I hope you'll forgive my lack of articulation, and hear the heart behind this. I hope that Jesus can get to the places inside of you where you've become the unlawful bearer of burdens that were never yours to begin with.

And I really hope that this really does radically change my entire life so that people who know me will be in total awe of what God can do. Cause if he can make me compassionate and not cynical, than you ought to know it is a miracle!

Ah, the great Mundane...and Superhero's

These are un-extraordinary times. It seems to me that life goes on tick after tock, breath after beat, and there is no accounting for taste. I am sure someone somewhere is experiencing some exhilarating portion of life. Maybe my friends in China. Maybe people in Africa. Maybe it’s just the Adam Cox’s in life that get all the good stories.

I want to live. What does it mean to live, really live? When will I find the thing, the people that win over my heart indefinitely and cause me to live inside? Maybe I am the problem. I feel somehow that it is not likely. Seems that everyone I know is struggling. It used to be so exciting when I was younger. So much of the world seemed conquerable. Now, I am conquered. By some weathering force of time, I feel as though I have become a part of the worn away terra where I exist.

Confession: I want to be a superhero. I want super powers and I want to save the world with them, and I want all of the attention, for at least a little while. I’ve wanted it my whole life. Zorro, Mighty Mouse, Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Aqua Man, Spiderman, He-Man, She-Ra, Wolverine, Rogue, Storm, the list is extensive. I love comic book movies and I always look for hidden meanings in them. Maybe God will talk to me through this one, and tell me that I am going to supernaturally have a healing web come from my wrist or a super utility belt of truth and justice will fall from the heavens and I will have the cure for redundancy all at once.

Homeward Bound, an Increadable Journey

Cheesey title I know. What can one do? I am going to try my hand at posting something to this blog of mine. It's been a while. My creative juices have been all but non-existant lately.

I have made a decision to move back to where the trees are higher than pride, where the earth smells like the garden of Eden, and where I was formed from it's dust and ashes. Not to the "exact" place of my formation, but near enough to it to be a short journey for a visit.

My 7 plus years in Kansas City have been...amazing. As I sell all of my possessions in a rash move to clear my life of clutter, I can't help but try to wrap all my memories, lessons, relationships, joy and pain into one neat pile. It doesn't work. I have to resign to the untidiness of history and how it doesn't all just iron out neatly when you look back.

Ophelia, my piano, was moved out of my apartment today. I played her one last time this morning, tried to sing, but my voice is so jacked up from being ill that I could barely squeak out some notes from some familiar songs. They came, those three broken men, to take away one of the only things that has kept my heart alive in the last 14 months. I am scared. I am nervous and excited. Like a little kid going to 1st grade for the first time. The anticipation of a new city, the big questions about my future, the fear of risking BIG again. I could just pee myself at the enormity of it all. But I'm graduating out of my graveyard, I'm sheding my fears and insecurites like a butterfly sheds its cocoon that has been so safe and transforming. I'm going to live. I AM GOING TO LIVE!! I AM GOING TO LIVE!!! SO HELP ME GOD!

Back to where the trees know me by heart, back to where shore air mingles with my sighing. I have never lived like this before. Never trusted like this before.

Leaving Kansas City is like leaving a family behind. I came here orphaned, and I am leaving fathered, mothered, sistered, brothered. There are going to be nights of racous laughter, and intense weeping this summer. As I say goodbye to my own memorial, to my own shrine. I'm leaving with regrets of the people I loved badly and hurt with the best intentions, I'm sorry. I'm leaving with a legacy of shedding a hard shell. I hope I'm leaving hope behind. Kansas City is not the end. You don't just come here to die and be left. There is a resurrection!

I hope that what I have learned here stays with me along with all the people that have loved me so well here.

My failures are abundant and not hard to spot, but I hope that from them comes strength and grace.

Colin, I'm moving to Portland. You wanna come??

Love always,
Anna Joy Walker

nearing 27

Its midnight. I’m trying. Trying to write, trying to live outside of my boundaries. Trying to love Jesus. I’m not actually doing anything that would be said as “loving Jesus”, but in my heart I am aware.

My season is changing. I have felt it in my heart, heard it on the wind, smelt it in rain. My twenty-seventh birthday is coming up so soon, and I remembered thinking about being 27 when I was a little girl, normally it was when we were talking about our dreams and our lives as far as what big things we were going to do at certain ages. My big age was 27 and 28, unlike my friends, whose big ages were 20 and 21. Maybe I knew back then that it would take me a while to grow up and become stable, in some sense of the word, or maybe I was just prophetic. With that in mind, I was thinking about these last years in KC and how difficult it has been. And I was asking the Lord about all of it, about the meaning behind the pain, etc. I was asking him what was in store for me for this next year of my life labeled 27. We came back to Isaiah 62. I bawled my way through it again, this time out of The Message.

Here it is. Still, I love Jesus. Still, worship is my favorite expression. Still, I need Him. Still, He is so good. Through all of our years together, still he wants me. Still, he fights for me. Still, he is worthy. Still he is beautiful.

new things

Rapidly I am moving toward the end of my last week here at this florecent enduced insanity, called an "office job". White walled tomb of hope defered, busted open by the ringing of my little black phone. Sleek and sophisticated as it is, added to by the voice on the other end telling me that Jesu heard my cry and is "reassigning" me, to a place that I can sing loudly at! HA!

Okay, so enough of this cryptic message. I just wanted to let you, my BR family, know that just as I was at the cliff ready to jump off Aslan pounced on me and told me to go another way...(again with the dorky cryptic stuff, gosh!)

Let's try that again.

Some of you may know how unhappy with my J O B I have been. It so funny to me how this thing that earns us a living is called by the same name as the tested man in the bible, that kept begging for some kind of repreve and justification regarding his righteousness and how he did not "deserve" this punishment that was being put on him, and YAH came in a whirlwind, and told Job to not be so impressed with himself and his wonderful heart...and Out of the Whirlwind he asked Job all these essential questions about the Creation of the universe and about cool animals, and Job just sits there dumb, and comes to the conclusion that God is waaaaaayyyy bigger then his "JOB reality"....

So maybe that's what happened to me. Maybe I was lamenting my undeserved "dark night" claiming God's perfection outloud, but in my heart loathing it because I didn't see the end from the beginning like He does...So after asking me some hard questions, I think he may be letting the dawn peak through (again), maybe this time, it will turn into full-fledged day!!

I got offered a new JOB out of the blue. Something that I love to do, something with coffee...ha! who'd have guessed. Something with art and community and other things that I love. Something I can make a living off of!! This whole story seems crazy and surreal to me, luckily I had no children that died, and don't have to deal with the doubling of those either.

(SORRY!!! haha)

She may be weary, women do get weary, wearing the same shabby dress, and when she's weary, try a little tenderness. She may be waiting, just anticipating things she may never possess, while she's without them, try a little tenderness. Its not just sentimental, she has her grief and her cares, but a word so soft and gentle, makes it easier to bear. You won't regret, women don't forget it, love is their whole happiness, and its oh so easy, try a little tenderness.

thanks Jesu

SEE YOU FOLKS TONIGHT AT 7PM!!

Forgive my ramblings if you are too straight laced to follow along...If you are, just come see me, I'll help you learn...(so will bustos, he's good at noodling, (what is noodling?? I have no idea, except it is the term I have only just now come up with to describe the way that bustos has a knack to weedle (another word) his way into peoples lives and hearts and help them get out of thier ruts (thanks Brian)))

progressively excited!
anna joy

Veiled Faces Part 1

I’m listening to my all time favorite album. I love pulling it out and playing it after having a long absence from it. It brings me to a place of peace and a hidden rest. I say hidden because when I listen to the mellow sounds of this album I feel like I’m hidden away in the remotest of places and all around me is beauty and that soft subtle ache that reminds me that I am human. I like being reminded that I am human, though it is painful sometimes, it grounds me to the earth I so long to be away from. But this is where I belong, amongst the restless beauty of the world held together by will.

A few nights ago I was sitting journaling somewhere and feeling sorry for myself, per usual. And I began having memories of dreams that I have had in the last year, and I heard the Lord tell me that I have not been abandoned like I had supposed and that I needed to realize just what kind of intense communication I have experienced in my darkest times. He told me that I was acting like an abandoned, orphaned, neglected child by my Father and that I needed to stop doing that, because it wasn’t true.

He hasn’t broken his promise to always be with me. I just haven’t seen it the way he sees it. I’ve begun thinking about that, thinking about the processing we do as believers, and how little faith we have in God when we “process”. It’s all such a tension and I know that’s how it is suppose to be. I’ve also been thinking about the veil that is between all of us right now. It’s like we are all seriously hidden from one another. I’ve don’t remember another time like this in my life when I have felt such a strong sovereignty about the way we are all polarized from each other, but in the conversations I have had lately it’s like we are all walking on the same invisible path quite closely together, but no one sees it.

I’m working on some thoughts that I am going to work on, regarding this hiddeness…

Alone: The Beauty and the Pain

November 30
When God Breaks In

We are plunged into mystery – what Abraham Heschel called “radical amazement.” Hushed and trembling, we are creatures in the presence of ineffable Mystery above all creatures and beyond all telling.
The moment of truth has arrived. We are alone with the Alone. The revelation of God’s tender feelings for us is not mere dry knowledge. For too long and too often along my journey, I have sought shelter in hand-clapping liturgies and cerebral Scripture studies. I have received knowledge without appreciation, facts without enthusiasm. Yet, when the scholarly investigations were over, I was struck by the insignificance of it all. It just didn’t seem to matter.
But when the night is bad and my nerves are shattered and Infinity speaks, when God Almighty shares through his Son the depth of his feelings for me, when his love flashes into my soul and when I am overtaken by Mystery, it is kairos—the decisive inbreak of God in this saving moment of my personal history. No one can speak for me. Alone, I face a momentous decision. Shivering in the rags of my fifty-nine years, either I escape into skepticism and intellectualism or with radical amazement I surrender in faith to the truth of my belovedness.

“His master replied, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness!’”

Matthew 25:21

Brennan Manning
Reflections for Ragamuffins
Daily Devotions
Page 335


I'm not sending this because I read this everyday and I am a super "ragamuffin christian" because I have Brennan Mannings’ Daily devotional...but I'm sending it because I happened upon it yesterday and was struck by the simple profundity of it. Especially for this season of my life, and as I have been finding out from my friends, the season that many of us are in right now. The season of learning to embrace the dark ominous "alone". I am afraid of it, but then there is this awkward feeling of knowing that I should be okay with being alone, and I mean ALONE, and then this other reaction to it that seems to slam into me, and I have to run. So, when someone asks me how I am doing lately, I have been answering, "I'm learning to embrace loneliness", because I have no other way to put it. And I feel that for me, this lesson is too important to glaze over and rush out of. And proudly I see many of you doing the same thing with this question of "drinking the cup of aloneness". [side note to all of my friends who would add to this, "that does not discount the central importance of community and intense accountability in our day to day lives"] As we all know, we can be in a room full of people we love and who love us, and still feel profoundly alone. Anyway, I hope that you haven't lost all interest in reading what I was really sending this email out for in the first place.
Reflections of Ragamuffins...Brennan Manning...get it. Read Ragamuffin Gospel if you haven't yet, and if you have, reread it.
I love you guys. Thanks for listening, or reading I suppose.
And let me just say that I am glad to be your friend in this season of our lives. I'm thankful for the variety and quality of the people that God has woven into my life. You are amazing, you are the Beloved. Pretty much, you just rock my face off.
ajw

trust:tact

The heart beats the same as it always has. Some times slow and steady, other times fast and frantic. Today, it’s slow and steady, a little heavy, but she’s still beating. She continues to beat even when I ask her to stop because it hurts the way it does when life happens. But today, its “steady as she goes”.

I was reminded last night, something about trust, something about life.
I was reminded that my heart is above all else, desperately wicked, and that I don’t know it. I was reminded that I don’t trust myself, and unfortunately it translates into me not trusting in God or people. Then I was reminded that somehow it is idolatry. That maybe it isn’t up to me trusting my heart, but really the issue resides somewhere else, where some need has gone unmet, by the only one that can meet it. And presently I am on this blindfolded journey to this mysterious conclusion as to what that might possibly be.

Maybe if I weren’t so melancholy about everything (other than laughing) it wouldn’t be that big of a deal. But of course I must over-analyze all of it and therefore pull something apart that maybe doesn’t need to be dismantled.

Simply stated: Trust God.
Such a huge statement. I honestly don’t know how people do it honestly. I have such a wrestle with it that I can only believe that people aren’t telling the whole truth (as sometimes I do while I am talking “victoriously”) and they struggle with it, maybe not as much as I do, but at least more than they let on.

And not that it matters about them anyway. What matters at this moment is me and Jesus: me and my Father.

I had a somewhat jarring reality check last night with honesty and transparency. Someone said something to me that seemed inappropriate and out of context, and knowing their heart I realized they wanted just to be completely honest and forthcoming. And I sadly remembered a time when I was not as tactful as I am now (Yes, I was much worse than I am now…if you can believe it), sadly because I felt more integrity in myself, more honest about who I was when I had less tact. Not that I do not have integrity now, it is in different form I guess.

I wonder if the thing that drives tactlessness for the sake of “I’m just being honest” is from the need to be known and loved. That’s most likely what it was for me. I just wanted to be loved and accepted for who I was at that moment. But then the problem becomes this: what if people love you in ways that you may not recognize as love in the way you receive it, and therefore by placing a “burden of truth” on them for the sake of “honesty and love” you are pushing them away from you.

I don’t know if any of this is lucid at all. Just asking some questions, as usual.

iffyness

I have been having a hard time remembering who I am lately.

It seems that since I have been home I have been struggling with all the things that I thought were just my doing. But I am discovering that it is mostly this atmosphere around me that helps press these lies into the fabric of whom I thought I was. I read a quote today that intrigued me, “Who you are never changes, just your perception of who you are changes.” And in so many ways I feel that that is true. Because isn’t it true that from before the very foundations of the earth was laid that my true identity was birthed in the heart of God as he began thinking about me, and about who I would be when he put flame into flesh and gave me a name? And from birth I always remained to be that very flame that originated in his heart, but I was born into sin and have been attacked since the day I was born, since before I was born.

It seems to me that when the thought of you enters the heart of your parents when you are found out that somehow darkness sees the type of light that you carry even as a multi-cellular fetus-being knit carefully together in your mother’s womb, and there is a strategy that is birthed in the heart of evil tailor made for you to start ASAP.

That is my belief anyway, because I seem to have been fighting this fight (or losing this fight) my whole life, pretty much without fail. And it still seems to be the very thing that Jesus keeps coming back to, to tell me about who I am. Sometimes it is so tiring hearing it again because I feel like I have failed so many times at becoming who that person is. And I so don’t feel like its ever really possible. But then moments like these remind me that I am not trying to be anyone. I already am who I am supposed to be. I am filled with light and the darkness cannot overwhelm it because it’s Jesus. And if my heart condemns me, that’s okay, because God is greater than my heart. He doesn’t condemn me. Even when I am faithless, he remains faithful, for he cannot deny himself. That has got to be my life scripture. I cling to that more and more, over and over again.

It’s my story of love and redemption. Jesus and me, or Jesus chasing me, again and again. Relentlessly pursuing me because for a reason I do not understand he deems the fight worth it to him. I cannot comprehend a love like that. It is too great!

What I noticed is that if I am depressed about my life, I just have to talk to someone about what is going on and for whatever reason I get all excited and feel better afterwards. I know that a part of my depression is the fact that I am living a very selfish life and am not giving myself to anyone, except maybe my friends sometimes. And even then it’s iffy.

Superhero Identity

Your Superhero Profile

Your Superhero Name is The Dawn Singer Your Superpower is Solar Your Weakness is The Color Red Your Weapon is Your Mystic Bow Your Mode of Transportation is Fire Engine

ARRRR!!!! Me Mateys

It's International Talk Like a Pirate Day<http://www.talklikeapirate.com> ARRR!

Anna Joy Walker, your pirate name isDeckswabber Nimble Toe

Walk da plank ye swarby marby's!

New Beginnings

Writing is shit these days. Something subversive in me is taking over my love of words, because maybe in these days of waiting and semi confusion I have no words, I only have waiting and I only have hope and trust in my Father. I don’t know what he is doing. I can only guess and my guesses hopefully fall far short of what is really happening inside me, outside me, all around me.

I’ve been experiencing some intense emotions but have no idea what they are doing because these are very deep. Perhaps it is like a mother waiting and expecting something that has life, breath, and a heart beat to come out of her at the appointed time. And all she can do is wait and care for herself because as she does that her baby is cared for.

So I guess I am saying that this season seems to be about me caring for myself because there is something beautiful about to come out of me. Something full of life and hope and joy. And I don’t know what it is. I would love for it to be an actual child, but that would be impossible. And then again, God is in the business of doing impossible things in me and my life.

I thought it was impossible to be loved and desired, that has been demolished as well as some other hideous lies that have consumed me for the entirety of my life. And the impossible is happening because he is enjoying me right now. And I am letting him enjoy me in all of my beauty, all of my failings, all of my everything. The only thing I know for sure right now is that my Father’s heart is completely for me and completely good. He is the only one I trust with my heart. I think that has been the thing he’s been trying to get at for many, many years, but it is just now entering into the part of my heart that I can actually respond to him in that place.

It is amazing what life circumstances can change the entirety of your internal being. I have turned a corner in my life in the last 3 months. I have become a more whole version of myself. I am like Anna, version 6.1. Just a few short months ago I was like at 4.2, a year ago I was 3.9. And who knows where I will be in another 9 months.

I keep seeing the number 8, which means, I guess, new beginnings. Who I am is so wrapped up in my Father. I love that I can say that. That my heart has settled in this place that says, “no matter what happens, he will be with me, I will be with him.” I have ceased being concerned with how people view me. I am sure some of that is still alive in me, but I am in a space of favor with my Father these days. And I know he sees me through the purest eyes, and the most excited heart about who I am. I love that! He is my biggest cheerleader. That is just a really weak word. He is the Creator of the Universe and he sees me and cares about my heart. His name is on me and his investment is in me and he more than anyone else wants to see all of the glory of himself that he planted in me come out in a brilliant display of joy. And I want to see it too! I want the world to see it! The beauty of this beautiful God in me.

I love that I am being reminded of all of the lost parts of myself. It’s like all these pieces that never seemed to fit in one place are finally finding rest inside of me as I find rest in my Father’s arms. I love that he perfectly wove me together in my mothers womb and that over the last 26 + years of my life he has been meticulously drawing out the colors in this masterpiece. I’ve never understood it before, never appreciated it before. But he’s given me new eyes, and a new heart.

I have begun to experience that the more of God that I see in myself, the more I see in other people. The more beauty of his indelible mark in me, the more in others. It’s an awesome game. I think it may have always been the point.

Fight Club

sometimes I wonder why scars are so visable on some people and on others they are not.

I watched Fight Club today for the first time. There is a steady stream of males in my life that all answered the same way when asked what their top 5 movies of all time are. Fight Club is almost always in the top 3.

And I guess I am going to need some male mind to explain it to me. I appreciated the twists and turns, but maybe the estrogen in my blood prevented me from seeing it the same way those that are predominatly ruled by testostrone.

So I welcome some male insight into this most intriguing of films.

a new day

Sometimes it happens so suddenly...a new day...sometimes it happens gradually, so much so in fact that you didn't really realize it was happening until you are riding home blinking away the late afternoon sun, happy and satisfied.

That's what happened to me today. I started out annoyed, was up too early for my enjoyment...I am after all "on vacation". (If you can call driving 4 days with trucks full of parents things, and sleeping in the living room of their tiny apartment a vacation). Maybe that is why I have made the mistakes I have made while I've been here. No, I will not tell what they were, enough of you know by now...Maybe it's because for SOME FREAKY WIERD reason there is some kind of magnetic shift in the plates underground and my right hemisphere has some wacky reaction to it which means doing things completely to surprize myself and the people who know me best.

I do strange things when I am here. That's probably another reason why it's so hard for me to come back.

I am in my hometown by the way, in case you hadn't picked that up from the previous postings...

So back to my day...I woke up too early and watched tv too long, then finally got up to pay bills. then my sister was over for lunch and mom came home...now at some point in all of that I suddenly had a realization (I think it was as I walked to the toaster to put bread in it) that the pj bottoms I was presently wearing at the time are the most comfortable things in the whole entirety of the world...for me anyway. So soft like only worn cotton can be and just plain perfect. I think it was at that point (pretty sure I did a happy jig in my most comfortable pj's) that my day began gradually becoming new.

Then I got out of my pj's to put on even more comfy clothes (not only in material nature, but also in color nature...wrinkley chocolate brown skirt and matching tank and pale pink shirt (a new favorite combo) YUMMIE), hair up in an unassuming bun, looking rather ravishing even without the makeup, if I might be so bold...finally donning fav pink flip flops and hot sunglasses I was ready for a little adventure with my mom, she was driving. Horray!

We went down to LaConnor, a cute little off the beaten path tourist shopping place, with nothing but adorable boutiques and awesome gallaries, all filled with things by local artists. Quite the treat. I don't know if there is anything better than those days when you feel absolutely comfortable in your own skin, and in knowing that realizing the absolute power you possess.

My mother and I lesiurely perused differant interesting shops, getting filled with new ideas and a little annoyance at why people would pay so much money for something, and boy we had better do something about it. having a late start made it only a short trip to the quaint little shopping district of the home of the tulip fair.

A little more on comfort...
I am coming to realize that there is a natural beauty a woman possesses if she is comfortable with herself just the way she is. Even if she is not "naturally" attractive on the symetrical scale of how the human mind processes beauty, there is something about the way she holds herself not to blame that makes her automatically a safe place.

I wonder if that is not why I am here. To somehow repave old paths in my brain with some sort of truth that was pounded out by countless lies through my youth of how I was not symetrical enough for society. And now, with some unknown confidence, in a newly discovered power, I walk differant. I pass the mirror and look. Normally I hurry past it, ignoring the reflection all together because of the shame I mostly feel. But now...hum...I pause and, not in vanity, admire features I forgot exsisted on my frame. Somethings' changed. No longer a hideous ogre, unable to be loved...in some strange and painful twist of fate I see for the first time why I am named "Graceful".

And so the new day has maybe possibly become newer in deeper nuances of meaning. Maybe all this pain was really to uncover undiscovered and undelighted in beauty in a creature as unlikely as me.

We woundup the trip by driving up my favorite stretch of marriage between asphalt and beauty. It's called Chuckanut Drive. I then realized as I hung my head out the window dispite the cool sharpness in the air (imagine that on an August 2nd) to sniff the unmistakable, unreproducable smell of heaven made only by trees, undergrowth, moss, ferns, salt water, and clean air, that I was happy. Happy to be me, right then right there, going the opposite direction I had always gone as a child...wondering what it was all for...

more thoughts later.

poster

How do you live in a house that is static with the sound of gripping silences, filled with anger, disappointment, failure, and pain?

How do you call such a place "home" that has stifled you and given you the wrong name? What's to become of you in the suppos-ed comfort of your suppos-ed home where all you are is chained to the ideal of what a mediocre life should be,

and you, my friend, have become the poster child.

I used to call you home...

Bellingham, I used to call you home:

Vague familial ties keep me coming back to you.

“The Great Green Haunting”, that’s what I shall name you.

Constantly eroding the softened edges of my memories, singing an enchanted tune, calling me, like the tide responds to the moon, home to the shores of my belabored birth.

And so I return, and like a bitter sweet reunion you tell me you were once in love with me in our youth and now so much time has passed your heart has turned for a less softened girl.

It seems to me that you cannot handle the femininity I now carry between my lips, my arms, my hips. You can’t seem to handle the confidence with which I step.

You awakened for a moment to show me your strength and then you denied all feeling, and gravitational pull to what you know is your dream finally fulfilled in a being too real to be true.

And yet, here I am.

I walk barefoot in the grass whenever I come home, I like the grass here. It’s cool and sort of sticky and somehow it roots me to the earth…

You never were enough for me, but the memory of your beauty and the desire that curbs all of your roughened edges still gives me some unfounded hope that someday I will not come home to pain.

You. Are a cross that I bear, and I probably feel the same to you, and we are both weighted down by unspoken paragraphs of pain, desire, truth, beauty, strength, and something I think might be love.

And this time its different, it’s the end of something, of unrequited desire that lay smoldering for years. Snuffed out finally by time and so many tears, held captive inside of me, I forgot to breathe, pain so great, I’d love to hate, but find myself unable or unwilling or maybe I’ve just learned how to be forgiving after all of these years.

amtrak

July 8, 2005
Amtrak to Jacksonville

Families that travel together, stay together. That should be the Amtrak motto; it might get them more business.

So the thing I notice about this train traveling business is that there are a lot of African-Americans that travel the rail system on the southern half of the east coast. And they travel as families. It’s pretty amazing really. There seems to be a whole other side to the culture that I haven’t seen much of. They are mostly kind (even to white people) and it’s almost like it is relaxing or something. There is kind of a calming effect that the train has on people anyway. It’s like magic. (except in the middle of the night when they are going 80 miles an hour over really old tracks and make you rock back and forth so bad you feel like you may fall out of your seat, it feels funny)

I’ve heard rumor of the government cutting spending so much for Amtrak that they are no longer going to have continuous service to the places they have had. Which is a travesty I think because my children may not be able to take these types of trips when they are my age or even younger. And they won’t get to hang out with the stuptifying weirdo’s and the African-American families and the older Jewish couples that ride the rails. The great American equalizer, for the most part. I mean there still is business class and probably first class, and there are sleeper cars for the overnight stints, like the one I just did from DC to Jacksonville, but the majority opts for the abundantly spacious seats and leg room of the coach class rail. Sleeping was defiantly a challenge, but once you get tired enough you just kind of pass out for a couple of hours.

The changing landscape of the east coast has also been a plus, though I hate to admit that I slept through my favorite parts of the states, southern Mass, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. Now speeding through southern Georgia the massively mixed foliage of pine trees, oak trees, Spanish moss, shrubbery is nice. Much better than railing through the slums of places like Boston, New York City, Newark, Baltimore, DC. Pretty much everything outside of those places has been pleasant. It’s like the parts of America that they don’t want you to see. Parts that you never fly over on your way to big airports. That’s the other part of the Amtrak that I like, the honesty of it all. It isn’t pretentious in any way; it just doesn’t apologize for what you will see. The conductors don’t apologize for who you will be passengers with, nor with their vastly varying flares do you feel like you are being patronized, “water, juice, soda?” “watch your elbows”.

Ah yes, the great American railway system. A tragedy to ever lose, should be preserved for history’s sake. A wanderer’s best friend.

You should at some point in your life take the train down the east coast, or maybe up the east coast (it’s much less expensive on this side) and experience for yourself some of America’s richest culture. Do yourself a favor and ride the Amtrak.