Being lonely (young, & restless)

I am sorry I do not write very often. I think of things to write, but then - it takes a lot to shape those thoughts, and I get overwhelmed with schoolwork, dishes, watching the trees, talking with my roommates...everyday life. But now I have so much schoolwork to do (finals are fast approaching), that I cannot fathom doing anything but writing to you.

I am a lonely person. This is not an attempt to be pitied. I enjoy loneliness - I have made it an everyday study. I like going to coffee shops and diners by myself. Movie theaters. I like getting lost in places alone. Every time I get to a new city I spend hours (sometimes days) wandering through unknown streets until it feels like...it's mine (note: this has been done in NY at 3 am...not exactly comfortable, especially in winter, but I can say I have sat at a cafe table in center of the city, in the dark, without once seeing a car... I also know a good place to fall asleep in Penn Station...)

Though Boston is a small city, it has provided me with a new place to travel through every year - its spiraling, paved cow paths offer what every lonely wanderer desires (no certain direction). It has been a hard place to love though. Not instinctively - the buildings still make me feel like I'm a part of something very old and new all at once; there is a certain belovedness in their motley make-up (strangely beautiful, especially from a bridge over the Charles) - but its indifference has been difficult to get used to. Boston is cold and other - entirely different from where I grew up in California. And I often feel so other in it. 

Ha ha - I know, I have obviously been writing too many college English essays when I describe myself as "other." Unfortunately, though, I am no better than any other cliche. Boston, because of its otherness, has been able to make me more of myself - you are forced to bloom as something when your surroundings are so dissimilar. 

I think all new places do this to a person (...make them bloom...ha ha). Or maybe I only want to believe that; I cling to traveling like lichen to a rock (I love terrible similes...get over it). I want to go everywhere - I think I think I will be able to discover myself in foreignness. Of course, in reality, it is never quite so romantic. It is painful to begin somewhere new. It is harrowing being entirely unknown. And, maybe, at times, it is only running away. I do not know. But I have been blessed with people I cherish everywhere I've gone - they have made me who I am, though I may not ever see or speak to them again. There is a sort of profound satisfaction in finding places and people you love, and have loved you, in unfamiliar hamlets.

We are all lonely really - throughout our lives the one person we spend the most time with is ourself (yes, let's be Modern. Of course with a capital M). Everything leaves and changes - I clearly have no idea what this means in my very obvious 21 years. But it seems that what makes us most is loss. 

(Sorry if I'm being pretentious/gloomy/ridiculous...it's in my make-up...ha ha...and I've been reading A LOT of modernist novels for class...I'll make sure to dig into some Vonnegut  for perspective over break...)

You've been young or you are young - I feel like it means to know nothing and want everything. Or perhaps it is only to know so little of everything. There is some deep resistence "to settle," to not give up our idealism, but the shape of the desire lacks definition, or realism, or only includes a false, entirely negative one. I am guessing it will become neither, but a combination of the dreams and the everyday - maybe a little like the assorted Boston landscape.


(I'm listening to Tracy Chapman...90s retro chick. Also been into the Corin Tucker Band lately.)

Let's be profound: Love & identity

(Hey friends. This the blog I wrote for Create. But I will promptly write another, seeing as I have not written in a very long time.)

I am a Christian. Unfortunately, I don’t even know what that word means most of the time. Even while living in a “Christian” community, it is hard for me to understand Christ in myself, especially when that understanding varies so drastically in everyone I meet. There is an obvious and necessary divide between the messiah and his followers, but it is very hard not to be defined by the people who share my faith.

This is not a very new dilemma – it is one we all struggle with, whether we are Christians or not - the question of identity. How can we belong to different stereotypes within our culture (the Christian, the writer, the black dancer, the feminist, the gay male, etc.) without being tied to their connotations (the Christian is Republican and hates gay people, the writer is angsty and dreamy, the black dancer is really good at hip hop, the feminist hates men and never shaves her legs, the gay male loves shopping and tweezering his eyebrows)? And how do you understand your sense of self if you are also the connotation (if you are, for instance, a very doubtful and self-destructive writer, or a feminist who doesn’t shave her legs)?

I do not know the answer – I do not know who I am. And most of the time I don’t know who God is either. I know the sense I have of him there – I know how profound certain moments feel, the something beneath the leaves as they change color – the beauty beneath the beauty, so to speak. Those revelations are beautiful and unguarded, but they can also be rare, and difficult to share with each other.

I want to love God and love people - two very simple things. But they are never simple in reality, are they? And I often find that believing in God often undermines my ability to simply love and be present with the people I'm with. It becomes complicated. Our ideas of God do not always peacefully coexist. Sometimes it is an idea that says loving God means loving in a certain way, means preaching, going to church on Sunday, becoming a missionary in Africa, etc. None of these are necessarily bad things, and I might partake in all of them eventually, but God's beauty is not solely that. It is everyday - not glorious, or dream-like, not necessarily visionary, or even exalted - but simple, and often hard. Hugging your friends. Reading books. Making food for people. Writing. (ha ha...Okay, now I'm just talking about me....). Crying. Doing dishes. Worrying about money. Walking... Talking (ha ha).  


You get the idea - you live it too. We are most often blessed with ordinary lives. I'm just trying to figure out how to be myself ( very young and quite idealistic), but also real, and genuine; aware of (and willing to experience) pain, in order to understand God.  And become (at least, a little...) less foolish.

How am I both with and apart from you? What is it, in the most mediocre moments (eyes raising on the bus, two knees pressing together, a conversation in the cold), that seems to connect us? I want to believe in something that weaves us together somehow, that destroys the stereotypes, the lack of genuinity – a sincere respect and love that exists within and outside of ourselves, and allows us to truly care for each other. I just don't always know what that looks like. Or even how to believe in it.

you are a poem

hello dear world,

have I told you how lovely you are? Because you are – illuminating. The other day on the bus, where I spend at least fourteen (blissful) hours a week, it was raining (and so already perfect for dreamers). I sat in front of the doors, and every time they opened I was given a glimpse into a poem – a red house amidst a field, the neon light of a liquor store, green leaves reflected in a puddle, a boy in yellow boots crying. Poetry, I believe, is everywhere.

I have begun “teaching” the subject after school with two of my friends, at the high school about a mile from my home. It is nothing very dramatic – it is only a little over an hour of writing and talking about poetry once a week. The students are so smart and passionate – I probably learn more from them then they ever will of me. We are beginning a conversation of what poetry is: how it is formed, what makes good poetry, how it is different and similar to other art forms. 

Poetry shapes my vision of the world: as I was walking to the high school today, waving to my acquaintances along our street, watching the man across the road pouring soil from a bag next to his roses, smiling as a woman said "How are you dear?" as I passed her on the street, I was overwhelmed with an everyday and ordinary beauty. 

We went apple picking Saturday, and have spent the weekend baking apple things and having people over. It is simple, does not exactly sound profound, but then, the most profound things do not easily reveal themselves: the heat of the oven as you pull a cake out, drinking coffee and eating apple pancakes with your friends, arranging tables, lighting candles, watching movies, singing music in the family room. These "things" are what I imagine as the church - spending time with people, who believe or don't believe in God, talking of the terrible and the beautiful, in ourselves and the world; worshipping together in the "ordinary" miracles. 

One came in the form of a woman and her daughter yesterday, who came by our house because they heard we were tutoring. Mark, our Cornell graduate in civil engineering, has already planned a day to help her with her physics homework. 

What I am listening to as I write to you: "Tomorrow on the Runway" by The Innocent Mission. And... this post will also be published on the Create website.

Ordinary love

I love being at school - there is a thrill here that is so fulfilling - I could read books and write papers and talk about books and papers for the rest of my life. I don't want to leave. Every time I think about leaving Simmons I get so sad, cannot even imagine it. I do not know where my life will be next year and that is both exciting and uncertain.

I am reading Mrs. Dalloway again, for my Virginia Woolf & Jane Austen class (envy me: writing an essay on Pride and Prejudice this week). There are few things as lovely as sitting on the bus (this morning, last night) while it rains (water and words), while I am lost in something so beautiful, so much like a poem - it just goes and goes, layers image upon image -

But everyone remembered [thought Mrs. Dalloway]; what she loved was this, here, now, in front of her; the fat lady in the cab.

She so worships and fears words - loves them for their beauty, despises them for their flimsy inadequacy. I love her ebb and flow, her syntax, the way her sentences form not only a story, but a song (I am also reading The Iliad right now, they remind me of each other). She desires the present: the everyday; Clarissa walking in London for her flowers, seeing the fat lady in the cab (what a glorious moment). If you have not read Michael Cunningham's The Hours I would - it is so - I will not attempt to describe it. But it is about Mrs. Dalloway and Virginia Woolf, and one of my favorite books. I wish I could spend my life reading and writing in coffee shops. I wish I was less in love with words. Today I will share a poem with you that I wrote (it has just been written, so it might not be entirely finished):

The sun this morning

Stay with me in the error of dreams

lifting golden

in a window so lit

I want to reach inside

and grab God by the bones -

not the sallow faced savior

with eyes like hell passing

cement rooms.

I believe in a God of the ordinary, the everyday; I believe in a God of tea, a profound bit of sun in the window, on the sidewalk, the way dark chocolate tastes with coffee, some arms around me, wandering in a museum with a view of the Eiffel Tower on a Sunday afternoon, making balloon animals with my neighbors, sitting on the porch last night while the sky was gray mist, looked as though there was a fire beneath it, the green leaves drifting, flying - the world grabs me and I cannot give it up.

Create

you can look at my home's (that christian intentional community where I live) weekly blog here (we take turns writing)

:)

http://createboston.webs.com/apps/blog/

Community

The word has become a popular ideal in our culture, pasted in between grocery store aisles, cutely drawn up in the elementary school parking lots, scrawled in the real estate office, the bank, where you buy your smoothie, the WalMart down the street and on tv. It is overwhelming – at once so desired and intangible, certainly not always prevalent in our conversations with the bank teller, even less so when he or she is replaced with a machine.

“Community,” in so easily alienating a world can seem frivolous, pretentious, merely a pile of letters. It seems especially so to live in “intentional community” in one of Boston’s poorest suburbs (five white twenty somethings living where we’ve never been and certainly don’t look as though we belong), and to become a non- profit entitled C.R.E.A.T.E. (Christian Relationships Enabling A Transformational Environment) – a breathless string of syllables that can sound crazy, pretentious, colonial, and just really stupid.

Community, communion, commune, communism, communicate – this vocabulary bears the common and the profound; it varies between community (what we share), and what it means to commune (“to experience a deep emotional or spiritual relationship with something”) and communicate – something that I believe occurs when we take communion and give our common selves to a profound savior, share with him our inner fears, sins, hopes, beauty – when we have a genuine and sincere relationship.

Our house resides perpendicular to Blue Hill Avenue, green trees wavering throughout the city, people sitting on their porches, the sidewalk, the sound of sirens, children laughing, yelling, even an overwhelming quiet sometimes– it is a place I loved almost instantly. There are three girls that live above us, all no taller than our shoulders, with eyes like moons and energy like (very joyous) chaos, who have begun to knock on our door almost daily.

It is not easy to try to live like Jesus, hard to even attempt to become so vivid and illuminating – difficult, in theory, to let three young girls spend hours in your house daily. It is hard to commute to school, to have a job, volunteer at the high school, homework, classes, a covenant with the four people I live with.

But when the girls lead me from this room to the next, paint every fingernail a different color, bake and eat chocolate chip cookies around the table with us, laugh so openly; when I pray in the evening with my roommates, the sound of rain through the window, God so close I am breathing him – I feel blessed, at peace, beauty surrounding me – it is something I cannot easily fold it into words. It is hard and profound as God has always been, but I feel safer here than anywhere, in community with God and what he creates, and gives us to create. I have been reading Franz Wright’s book of poetry Walking to Martha’s Vineyard, something I cried through upon first reading, and something I feel now (though not nearly as well) at the end of one of his poems “One Heart”:

Thank You for letting me live for a little as one of

the sane; thank You for letting me know what this is

like. Thank You for letting me look at your frightening

blue sky without fear, and your terrible world without

terror, and your psychotic and hopelessly

lost

with this love

yours, hannah

(this post will also be posted on the C.R.E.A.T.E. website: createboston.webs.com)

Wordless (& jobless) chocolate-cupcake-eating cliché

Today I did nothing. By nothing I mean I ate a whole very rich and decadent chocolate cupcake (with real, big, dark, chocolate, chips in it), read some more of this mediocre book that I am going to finish, and...I think that's it. No - wait, I also signed my MLNP pin thing (I will owe the macho loan hermanos thousands of dollars after I graduate), and read Joy the Baker's blog, maybe drooled over some dark chocolate brownies I am not going to make. And left a depressed message on a couple machines of the above title's variety, AND started The Canterbury Tales (which I am going to read in attempt of moral support for my sister's AP English class. And because as an English major I'm pretty sure I should have read some of good ole boy Chaucer by now....).

I know (just what I was thinking) - I don't even have time for a job (especially with my incredibly impressive number output of a certain conjunction), even if, due to a continued state of self-inflicted inadequacy/misery/"I have nothing new to say" writer's angst, I have not opened one word document, not even to scroll through and "edit." So pathetic, feel very sorry for me.

Not that the day is over. It is not over. I haven't watched 7 episodes of Weeds, conveniently available instantly via my family's Netflix account in a continuous, never-have-to-get-up, have-dreams-I-am-a-suburban-housewife-drug-dealer fashion. Plus I have not cleaned the house. And I am going to clean the house. And, let's face it, when you give a girl a chocolate muffin, chances are, she's gunna want a dark chocolate brownie to go with it.

ABOVE PHOTO: son-of-a-no-good-cheating-piece-of-a-chocolate-chip