Athena: #same

Dear Augustine,

Oh, for me it's most certainly been the several years of silence. Not just on this blog, but everywhere. I have not been writing. I have not been reflecting in a sustained and meaningful way--though I have sometimes yearned to do so--I have been. Close to drowning. Treading water in an ocean where wave after wave keeps hitting me and all I can do is think about how to survive the next one. I do and then I know another wave will be coming soon. It has been a month since I resigned and I still have not really and intentionally made the space that I've needed to, in any sustained way, to breathe.

That will need to be my goal for this upcoming Thursday, I think. Now that I have finally gotten to a better place with school work. Or at least am in the lull between finishing everything I was behind on and needing to aim towards the bigger projects that will be coming at the end of the term.

Yes to being on the same team. Yes to feeling that same pain alongside you and with you, because some days it is such an utter ache. My former boss responded to an email I had written, the evening after I spoke to you, and said something like, "We didn't take a chance on you. We recognized that you belonged. You still do, even if you're not here," and I let out a breath that I didn't know I was holding. I have read and re-read those words at least a dozen times in the past three days.

Yes to needing an organizing mythology (and Joseph Campbell has been on my list forever and ever and I need to actually read the book I own of his. I can't remember if it's Hero of a Thousand Faces or another text of his, though.

---

[Picking this back up a week later]

Yes to all of it. We just spoke on the phone about the dream of "educational consultants", but I thought I'd capture some things here too. Yes, yes, yes, to that. Though I don't want to own my own company ;). But I just like the idea of working with students one-on-one and helping guide students so that they can be the best possible versions of themselves.

What would it look like to build something like that in an equitable and accessible way--so that students of all backgrounds could benefit from it? Would would it take to make that a reality?

I'm so grateful that you are with me on this journey,

+Athena

Augustine: Falling

Dear Athena,

I found this quote in a book think you would enjoy reading, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe.

"Do you remember the summer of the rain… You must let everything fall that wants to fall." - Karen Fisher.

 

I'm staying at my parent's this week while they are out of town. It's strange to have so much time and space to myself. I usually have plenty of time to myself at the house with the guys, but that is crafted and means staying in certain areas or negotiating space even if we do it with our awareness instead of words. Here, I walk move from room to room with no hesitation I'm about to come upon someone. There is no need to be anywhere or feeling that I shouldn't take up a space. It's so freeing to feel entirely able to follow a whim or desire and there be no one else to offend. My heart clinched up when I first came down to the house and moved some of my boxes in, when I realized I would start living here again and won't know when I move out. It felt like a sign of failure, an embarrassment. I spent all day exercising thinking I'd be able to burn it off, but my dreams last night were about my old job.

 

I woke up this morning and got out of bed. That may not seem like an amazing feat, but usually I spend time inoculating myself to being awake with some type of social media. It's like escapism for having woken up in my own body with my own problems. But today I went down and made coffee and let the dog out. I didn't have to question how many people I would make coffee for, or whether I could sit and read on the deck, or if I needed to pick up everything when I was done. I thought about what "I needed to do today" and looked at my list, but realized that it could be whatever I felt until later this evening when I have dinner and art projects with a friend. I didn't even mean to start writing this till another reflective thought struck me. I've already had a month off, but there is something about finally being alone that has allowed to appreciate the lack of productivity. There is no one to witness it and therefore it can just 'be' without judgement. I imagine that I was grasping the edge for so long, knowing that once I let go I would begin to fall so I held tighter and harder. But no one can go on holding forever. So I let go and I've been terrified of the fall and what happens when I land. "How could you let go?" Trying to find ways to still hold on "What if you can tried holding differently, or yelled once more for help?" when the edge is gone, out of sight, but still cutting up my mind.

 

A time passes though and I find the time spent falling to be boring but also luxurious. A solitude to the air rushing past me and now just a curiosity as to what will happen when I land. "What is at the bottom of all this? Who is to say?" Left to my thoughts for long enough and I can begin to recognize and categorize them. The fear of the landing, the wondering of what it will be like at the bottom, the desperation of wishing I was still grasping to the top, the anger at everyone who didn't prevent this from happening, the dual self-loathing and pity for now being here, the enjoyment of being in a freefall and all the fun I can have while it lasts. Pema Chodron would call this all "thinking;" to "touch the chatter and let it go."  Anne Lammott would help me to visualize it as the mice that won't top chattering in their glass jars; "Turn up their volume for a moment, hear it all, then turn it all down." I don't remember what Madeleine would say, but I'd imagine she would have me sit by a babbling brook in her circle of quiet and give me a happy buddha to look at. I find myself at this moment of falling feeling grateful to all the women who have found themselves falling before. No particular thoughts, but a warm sense of compassion for myself knowing they would have the same.

 

We pray to Alice, the patron saint of those who are find themselves endlessly falling, that we may find ourselves bored of the terror and chatter of our own fears. That we may consider and then let go of all the things that led us to be here and become curious and unafraid of what lies for us at the end of it. We pray to find compassion for ourselves in the falling enough that the air that rushes past will become as a soft support as we drift to sleep.

 

 

Augustine: Faith

Dear Athena,

I wrote almost nothing last month. I imagine that would be the perfect set up for a joke that would be analyzed later by some English teacher "He says he hasn't written this last month but won't speak to the last several years of silence." It hasn't all been silence, but this last month… I don't know that I want to reflect on it yet because it still feels like it could be my present. I'm trying hard to be here now in this new month, that's why I'm writing to you. Everything lit up yesterday and I felt myself dreaming. I remember this quote the moment were done and it fueled me while I jogged around the park:

"Faith is knowing that you're on a team even if you don't know the players."

I've wanted to have faith again, to have a mythos to rely on. I've been rereading "Pathways to Bliss" by Joseph Campbell (Hero of a Thousand Faces) and he speaks to the need of every human to have an organizing mythology and the reasons why. In the search of uncovering one's own he writes:

 "You might ask yourself this question: if I were confronted with a situation of total disaster, if everything I loved and thought I lived for were devastated, what would I live for? If I were to come home, find my family murdered, my home burned up, or all my career wiped out by some disaster or another, what would sustain me? We read about these things every day, and we think, 'Well, that only happens to other people.' But what if it happened to me? What would lead me to know that I could go on living and not just crack up and quit?"

In this moment of career loss, which is a particularly specific piercing of pain in my chest, it is the beauty of the cosmos that you should be on the same path at the same moment as me. An example of this faith that there are others on my team even if I don't know who they are. I felt myself, and if I could use my religious language, believing again. Not in the religion I held before, but in the belief that I was "Truly not alone in this" (Andrea Gibson - Living Proof). That there were other people on this team. As I listened to you speak about the desire and vocation and I could hear someone saying to me all the things I felt inside myself and it felt like liturgy, like prayer. As if someone knew the longing of my heart and brought it out, beleaguered from its cage, and set it free into the world as words in a conversation.

I dreamt as I ran, a feeling of flying as the sun felt like itself on my skin for the first time since it forgot. I thought of us reading books and talking of their meaning, I imagined us our naming our fears, the ones that can't be spoken till they are buttressed by all the lifelines we have stretched across the chaos that separates us. All the risks of vulnerable statements and the declarations of faith to what we could not imagine ourselves without. There was humanity there I had forgotten could be sustaining, that the relationship between two people could be enough to give life when all the necessities of modern American human life went unfulfilled. I remembered that life could be about the beauty of people sharing it with one another, that it is the greatest beauty in life. That I've been so drowned in the hustle of work, all the joy had been filtered out and I thought of peace and happiness only as a dull ambiance. I dreamt that we found others who would read with us and would share in this life with us and that we created for the sake of it, not because we would monetize it in some way. But that it so filled us that it was worth the effort unto itself. I know that is starts here as well, in this writing to you. I didn't think this could still be inside me most days. I knew that cognitively from articles and research and experience that this rests inside and will rise like a gust across the plains and other times fall silent and still, but I kept thinking "once I was safe enough then it would finally happen." But connection is the safety, not the material wealth.

I imagined us as "educational consultants" (aka mentors) who opened a private practice counseling students in schools through the anxiety of grades, starting new, testing, applying, and the confusion of what am I doing during this time. I didn't think about the money we would make, I thought of the ways we would struggle, but also be enraptured by the work of it. I don't have the details, I don't want to work them out alone necessarily. I imagined a world in which I open a gamestore in Denver and run D&D sessions for autism students for roleplay therapy. I thought about a safe space for queer kids, students of color and queer kids of color with a disability reading about superheroes who look like them.

 

I should tell you that in the time that I've written this, I made plans to have a dance night over at my friend's while his buddies on discord DJ; doing an art evening with a friend that we can create with no intention of selling; and asked some friends if they would talk to me about how to open a gamestore in my area. I'm feeling the itch to go on a run and I'm not sure if there is a proper way to end this letter. I want to leave it on a note of all the possibilities. How about this? In anticipation of hearing back from you, this is a writing play list by Buddy Wakefield (a favorite poet of mine). I listened to it while writing this to you and I hope that holds something of what I've described here for you as well. Athena, I feel a fragile and abundant faith knowing you are with me. 

Love you,

Augustine

Augustine: A Prayer for Becoming a Pillow

A good friend, I speak of frequently, sent me an email about a difficult family situation. He ended it with "At times the most appealing thought in the world is to become a pillow, and live out a life on a bed and occasionally under a head, between knees, etc. I spend mental energy fantasizing about being bedding, is my current state of being."

He asked me to keep his family in my thoughts. I wrote him this prayer in response. I offer it here. It is somewhere both silly and sincere.

Lord help me to be a pillow. Guide me in your tradition of bed-making which Jesus and the saints followed. On my journey in your stillness, open my air-pockets so I can comfort what is weary. Grant me patience to wait through the long day, both heated afternoon sun and dreary humid rain, and receive the heavy head that lays itself upon my down. Open my folded creases so I can welcome who is tired and bring calm dreams to the anxious mind. Open my folds and shape to the currents of air flow around me, that I may release the heat and sweat of painful dreams and take in afresh the cool night air; bringing it close to the mind burdened from the day. May my location be a familiar one, that those who lose me in the night, find me with ease. Shape me, O Lord, that my contours may alleviate loneliness from those who long to hold and be held. In the morning, I pray, make me a pillow to shield from a bright and stark light, but may I have brought rest enough to grant strength for the day. In my transformation, Lord, might I find all these qualities already inside myself, brought forth not through great effort, but in the midst of gentle contemplation. Amen.

Athena: Starting All Over

Dear Augustine,

I send you a picture of this quote, from The Book of Salt, earlier today. OOF.

I do not want to start all over again.
Scanning the help-wanteds.
Knocking on doors.
Walking away alone.
And, yes, I am afraid.

The context in the book is that a young man, from Vietnam, but living in France, is writing home to his brother. The words slip out of him, almost too raw and honest for the letter (and they're actually repeated twice.)

I almost cried.

For me, this hits home on so many levels. This is how I feel about finding a new job (search for that has been meh thus far, it's too early for when I'm actually available), but this is also how I feel about relationships. And online dating (which was brought up the other day when Facebook announced they were getting into it).

It's frustrating to feel like you have to start from scratch. It's terrifying to feel overwhelmed, like you have all these options in front of you, and you have to figure out a way to compare and sift through them all. And that's when you can find the options. In so many ways (jobs and dating) it just feels like I can never find something that's the right fit. Something doesn't work on somebody's end, and then it's the opposite the next time, and then it's just. It's so hard to get timing right, to make it all happen the way it feels like it's supposed to.

I was telling a friend earlier that I feel like Chandler Bing a bit. When they get close to getting married, she wants to know if he'll miss having the "firsts" of dating. He responds:

SO FRICKING RELATABLE. (x)



Maybe most people enjoy that newness part. I don't get sweaty, but it is all anxiety, feeling sick to my stomach (not butterflies. sick.), and just constant over-thinking and pressure I put on myself. I just. I wish that I could somehow jump past all of that and just be trying to figure things out 2 years in. I'd sacrifice the "new" parts to get to the comfortable and companionate aspects. But that's never how it works. And I can't skip the interview process and just fast forward to being a couple months in.

I have to go through all that work. And it is scary on so many levels. In my head, I keep telling myself that (at least with work), in a few months at the most, I will already be in my new situation, learning the ropes and figuring out how to adjust. This applying process will be a blip that I will get through. But I wish I could skip through it altogether, and I can't. With dating, I can, and I sort of have been. But then that just means never getting anywhere. I'm not sure if that's worth it.




+Athena

Augustine: And then...

Dear Athena,

I told you I would write up my thoughts on Rachel Held Evan's new book "Inspired." I'm endeavoring to read through it again and write as I read this time. Each chapter is incredibly moving in what it tells about the Bible and ourselves as people who read it. I don't know that I will necessarily have something to say about each chapter other than "It is good." But I will begin with what has found a place deep within me, and that is the epilogue.

It is with a tinge of regret that I give away the last section, but I will not do so in detail. The title of the epilogue is "And Then." Rachel describes her sister-in-law's masterful use of this phrase to coax stories from her family and friends and the use by biblical authors to carry a story forward with Waw Consecutive "And Then, And Then, And Then." She describes how we live in the "And Then." That we find ourselves in the narrative of this story, not as the main protagonist, but through theology "linking our individual story to the biggest story we can imagine."

I imagined the place of this phrase in my own life and the words I tell myself.

In my closet, I have in a box journals from my childhood and adolescence. Different kinds, sizes, colors, and materials; I collected them when I filled or abandoned the last one. Some were gifts given to me by friends, reading "Cheaper than therapy journal" and others are leather and I dug out of a corner of the basement. The earliest one I still have was given to me by my 2nd grade teacher as way to store story ideas, one of my favorites is a leather travel journal from my brother that quotes "Do not wait to be inspired to write, but write in order that you may be inspired." When I was feeling more like an adult and I emptied my parent's house of all my old possessions. I tried to get rid of most anything I would not use or would not revisit regularly. In the mess of creating categories (college books, high school trophies and awards, etc) I created a pile of journals. I don't know the person who has the strength to sift through old things and not stop nostalgically and pour over their contents. I glanced through pages, falling into the strangest moments of life in middle school or a college excursion. I found moments of spiritual formation on a retreat and silly gossip flying back and forth between friends. However, what I discovered most, and dreaded seeing because I knew it to be there, was the pages upon pages of desperation and disparagement for my sexuality. I couldn’t bring myself to read them then, I can't bring myself to read them now. I've held on to these journals in a box, in my closet, believing that one day I will be able to read them and find some use from their self-destruction.

Reading them now is not necessary, because they are scribed into my mind. When I accepted my sexuality, these words did not vanish. They were part of the story and are carried in the neurons of my mind that are relieved when I am imagining and planning and attempting my death. When I failed at a work task or let a friend down, these lengthy and destructive scripts start playing as an album.  It took years to recognize they existed, and longer still to recognize when they were playing. In time, I added to the wording on how to kill myself, with delaying phrases "Not now, wait until this thing…", but the belief still held that I was fighting an unwinnable battle. I would eventually lose against the script one day and die. I confessed this to a friend one day and they challenged me as to the truthfulness of this belief. "Why? Why do you have to lose someday? I don't believe that's true." He impugned the narrative, and my love for him meant I had to consider he might be right.

I let myself believe that as time progressed, the self-destructive script may become weaker and my resistance stronger.

And then, I read Inspired. Every chapter was like a billow of air into the heart of a just kindled fire. And then, I read the epilogue and I found myself rehearsing this phrase over and over and over again. And then, and then, and then. I imagined sitting in Maki's kitchen being asked this question again and again. I imagined the rabbi's asking me when I though my script was over "And then? What do we write next?" I imagine a great cloud of witnesses living and dead, turning their face to me and asking "And then? And then? And then? What does God do next?" I imagine a church and community holding me in their prayers with "And then? What do we see next in your life?" I imagine crawling into the lap of a God who holds me as they tell a story of "And then" about not only my future, the future of us, their people.

"And Then" is a script I didn't know would come. It is part of the story I did not think would ever arrive. The old parts of my narrative are not gone, but they are also not the end.

I woke up on my most recent birthday to an amulet sun rising on snowfields and iced branches. I had reached an age, for a long time, I never thought I would see, and it is beautiful.

+Augustine

Augustine: Increments

Written Last Night:

After debating between Brokeback Mountain and Call me By your Name, two movies I have never seen, I decided on the older one, knowing it was heartbreaking, and despite the feeling I already knew what the movie would be.

I finished it and immediately had to look up on the last line. Then I looked up more, and now I have been reading for at least half an hour till I stumbled upon the movie poster watermarked with "(2005)" and I realized that this movie came out, not during the college years when I was gracefully sheltered from the world, but in the midst of high school. I realized that when it came out I wanted to see it, but it also terrified me. It was not a celebration for me then. I did not think to myself how good it feels to be represented, but instead, how fearful I am that this is spotlighted for all to see. I wanted to see it then because I thought it would show me images that lusting teenage eyes wanted to see. It is strange to see it now and imagine that 16 or 17 year old watching this movie and trying to make sense of it. He was so controlled then. What would it have been to him to see the pain of not being able to talk about your feelings, to watch someone else suppress them, to watch them be embraced? What would this all have meant to that teenage boy?

What does it mean to this 30yr old man now? To see the time pass and dream of a life spent together with another? To see the loneliness that feels so present in his own life, displayed on the screen? What if you let go and lived a life you loved?

---Looking back on last night's entry---

I have been feeling this loneliness all morning.

I don't know where to begin with it. I thought I would sit down here and all the words would begin to flow out as they have been racing through my head all morning. But they suddenly feel stoppered. Not gone. Just held back.

Every time I begin with a thought, it seems too small.

I am so lonely Athena. I am so cut off.

--Break of Time--

Athena! My dear and close friend, Athena, Athena!

I went to reread your message that I have yet to respond to. The one that ends "I wrap myself in darkness. It shimmers." I wanted to write to you here, in this space that we hold for one another, and I, for the first time, read your letter from February.

Athena! Athena! Athena!

What a gift you are to me. What a moment of miracle to find this waiting for me.

There is such a great relief and comfort in reading your words for I feel them too.

I look back on the last 5 years since moving to Colorado and taking this job. "There has been so much that has happened since then, but nothing that's changed the circumstances of my life." I am exhausted from the change and demoralized by the lack of accomplishment.

Again, but with different words than those ones: I am tired of the churning and movement, only to discover then that I am still empty for all the effort.

A moment last night, while thinking of the boy that was me in high school and what he dreamed of, what my friends then dreamed of, would we ever have imagined ourselves where we are now? No. As a child I believed the future was a matter of effort and what I could make of it. That it was somehow a store and I could pick out what I wanted. It feels no more like a piece of land to build upon and I have only the resources at hand, or a canvas, already partially painted, and I have a limited mixture of paints from which to construct. If I am to paint with these colors, I must acquiesce to their to limitations. I cannot paint a traditional sunset without some shade of red or orange. I may be able to craft it from another genre or the sunset just at twilight when it is blue, purple, but it is at a different time. "Same friendships, same loneliness when I feel the reality of how far away my closest friends live."

The people and friends I am surrounded by are not the ones I thought I would be with. Yesterday I sat in a meeting with people I knew and had working relationships with and all I wanted to do was to be left alone. I texted this to my best friend Z yesterday, "I'm at an all day work meeting and it's lunch and I don't feel like talking with anyone. I'm tired. Texting you instead. " and a little later "It's not that I don't want to talk to anyone, it's that I don't really like any of the people around me in my life. I'm suppose to have dinner with my parents tonight and it sounds exhausting."

I've stopped going to work. I haven't spent even a half day in the office in 2 weeks (granted one was Spring Break so I don't know that it was noticed). Spending time with my parents is tiring and draining. I don't want just a vacation with good friends, I want my good friends to be my weeknights and lunch dates.

"For the most part I don't know what I want. I can't even really picture a dream job, because right now I'm just so freaking burnt out and in survival mode." I didn't get the job with Outward Bound and those I've told have asked me "Have you started job searching again?" For What?! I pull up job boards and see only new places to be stuck. I look at degrees programs (Law Degree) and I see opportunities for failure and little excitement. "I'm afraid to want things. That doesn't stop the wanting at all, of course, it just means that I keep submerging it and pushing it away. I hide it and I hide from it. Will writing it out help or just make things more raw?" -- The only thing I can think to do is to write it out. That maybe writing is the thing that will accumulate to change?

There is a counseling method (Solution Oriented I believe) that asks clients to think of a time when they didn't feel or experience the problem and to focus on why was that? There is a relief when there is a large change, like when I moved. It persists for a little while, acts as a guard against those things that may go awry. The moment that most clearly sticks out is when a friend asked me "What would your life look like if you stayed here instead of moving somewhere else?" I was shocked in the moment to discover how different I felt when I started appreciating my life as it stood now and the potential instead of viewing them as lacking. I think there is a cliché that tells us to 'stop wanting and appreciate what we have.' That is not helpful. This felt more like holding close the things I had, the paints at my disposal and rather than lamenting what colors they are not, meditating on them, what images can they become? What do the tools I'm holding give me? (For instance, there is a piano in my house. I paid for an app to teach me. There is a change to be had there).

It would seem that the changes of youth are more momentous, marked and milestoned. Semesters, graduations, major birthdays. I wonder if, on the whole, the changes of adulthood are of the incremental kind? They are not marked, but practiced? I find myself least in my loneliness when I write to this journal. When I am in great despair, I write to myself in a way to process. I shared it recently with a friend and she told me "*Augustine, you have such a way with words. That you can take this things… these abstracts and problems and you know how to put them into logic ways to deal with them. (Hand motions of fingers meshing) You find ways of talking about them and finding another way of dealing with  them." Last night at dinner with my mom, she told me that one of her coworkers complimented me to her about a meeting she recently had with me. She told my mom "He is so well-spoken. He thinks of things from a perspective I would never consider."

An author, if only I could remember who, once complimented for having chosen writing responded "I did not choose to write, it chose me." I wonder more with age if I have been chosen, and if need only to turn myself over to it. Not necessarily as a career, but as a practice, discipline, and ritual.

A woke up this morning, not sure what to do with this day. I had the notion that I might write a great deal. To you, in response to books, in letters to friends with cards that I brought with me.

I leave you now in this letter, not having resolved the fears and loneliness with a sound argument or comforting story, but, maybe, with a commitment. To write into the unknown and let myself discover who I become.

Love,

+Augustine