time, place, tenderness

encountering pain & beauty on the daily

Good morning beloved muses

Happy new week

Blessings on your February

Today I'm thinking about time:

how a number of people have said to me recently, “I don't think I was born for these times”/ I should have lived in a different era

I'm thinking about the seasons in my own life where I seemed to be in some kind of wrestling match with time

or maybe an intricate game of chess

or maybe pickleball

I don't play a lot of sports, but there's been such a game of hide and seek with Spirit in my lifetime …

I can catalog so many times when the feeling was why:

Why now?

Why me?

a feeling of being out of sync

out of step

out of time

Of late the words that resound in me again and again come from the book of Esther in the Bible, Old Testament and Esther talks …

Well no, I don't think it's Esther, I think someone else says about her,

You were born for such a time and place as this.

[Note: that was a super-loose remembering on my part. Here’s a link to one translation of the original, the words I was trying to quote come from Esther 4:14. The book of Esther is a quick read and well worth reading or revisiting.]

I remember hearing Nadia Bolz-Weber interviewed by Krista Tippett back in … it must have been 2014 or so, and hearing Nadia talk about that quote from Esther, and [Nadia’s] sense of like you know being born for the time she's in

& Nadia is an incredible writer and gifted minister and just a manifestation of such grace and love and truth telling on the planet (here’s her Substack) and within Christian circles she's been such a source of hope for me when it comes to Christianity as a living, breathing, evolving faith tradition

But I remember hearing that back in 2014 as I was struggling and trying to figure out being a freelance writer and living in Kansas and also trying to be a wife again and like making a lot of crockpot meals and having a hard time with my own creative work … and just in a space of floundering…

And I remember crying listening to Nadia and Krista talk about that,

just feeling like, I don't know what my time and place is …

Feeling so out of step and now, you know, 11 years later,

there's a fruition in my life where a lot of things …

a lot of the life experiences, like particularly the experiences of depression & feeling out of sync and out of step and out of time are serving me

Because I am not afraid of that feeling; I know it well

I have befriended and encountered that energy in myself with such vast tenderness and compassion,

but only after many many cycles and bouts of denigrating and shaming myself for that experience.

I guess I want to turn to anyone who's hearing this today or reading it and say,

If you feel like the timing is wonky or wrong

If you feel like you were born at the wrong time

or that this world is the wrong place for you

I invite you to encounter that voice in you that says that with far more tenderness than you would muster on the average…

Imagine a beautiful child or a little cat or dog

imagine a seedling, green ….

or a bud in a vase saying that,

& turn toward it with affection and curiosity.

I do believe that in the human journey part of it is coming to terms with time

& with so much beyond us calling forth what is within us

but not always knowing the why or the how or even the who or the where.

I waited to record this morning because I wanted y'all to see how beautiful the snow is outside, but you can't really see it,

It just feels like blindingness

Maybe you can sort of see it: the snow is clinging to the branches and it's just perfection of New England's coldness and crispness

& the sun is rising through the windows that I can see ahead of me

And somehow I can be both in the beauty of this moment and in the astonishing good fortune of my current life in which I get to both be of service and receive so much nourishment from others …

I can be breathing that in and fully receiving that and also utterly heartbroken at the same time,

knowing that the here and now of many people I love and also many people that I love only in concept because I've never met them …

so many are in deep suffering, darkness and/or simple persecution.

I say “simple” persecution because there are many who manage to be in truth and in love even in the midst of persecution

& that's miraculous

but the suffering is real, too:

the struggle when we feel in some way wrong

But I invite you to use all your faculties of imagination to breathe into a dream of a world that is more beautiful than the one we inhabit now,

because perseverating on the pain and wringing our hands at our incapacity to fix it all… that doesn't lead us where we want to go.

Maybe nothing needs to be fixed

and yet there is immense work we can do to alleviate suffering and cultivate joy

Maybe there is something divinely beautiful about this time where there is also pain

& maybe our heart is moved in the direction of taking real action and fighting …

There is no one way to meet this time

There is no right or wrong here;

There is a right and a left here

& there is the reality of constant change.

I'm gonna end by reading a journal entry that I wrote on Thursday morning:

Yesterday, much weeping in the night … snowfall, the vast expanse between what is and what still might be.

A beautiful workday, threadbare and porous, divinity gleaming every whichway through me. Making connections, finding myself in the loose tendrils of work undone, mistakes and meanderings and always I could have given more.

Knowing so deeply and faltering in my capacity to name what I know;

no truth can tremble from these lips unless I feel the invention urge me onward,

unless your invitation is too enticing to unhand.

Fearless and yet I remain fault-lined;

my story a mouthful of saltines mashed and stuck halfway up-down-roundabout my throat:

dry and impossible to access unless someone puts a glass of water in my hand,

unless your gaze asks the world of me,

unless I sense in my bones that you need to know.

The tears can come on at any time: I'm “that person” now, the one who can't stop crying even when she's embarrassed.

I will defend her with my life.