Mouldywarp

The other night it was pretty late and I was trying to fall asleep. I don't usually have to try -- my siblings and I have all been blessed with a remarkable ablity to conk out at the mere suggestion.  But I was laying there, not falling asleep, and Jonathan says, "ok, what are you thinking about?"  He knows I've been thinking a lot lately but it floors me how he can feel me thinking.  "Moles," I say, "I'm thinking about moles."  He busts up laughing.  They're not in my usual repertoire.  Yes, the little guys who pop out of the ground in my back yard in the middle of the night.  They left evidence of their tunnels last week.

I aspire to write something every month to post here, but July came and went and now it's into August and there's no July post.  Maybe it's because it's finally summer in Seattle and I'm starting to feel human again.  I was starting to feel like summer was ignoring me; and then when it rained a few days after the sun came out I was worried it was just gonna skip me like a joke I didn't get.  But now it's actually been over 60 for several days in a row and it feels miraculous.  I think I've almost forgotten how much I felt like a shadow all "spring."  Almost.

At any rate, this summer I've read a lot and celebrated a lot and and worked a lot and walked a lot and spread a lot of bark and am launching a new venture with a dear friend.  (More to come soon on that.)  I've spent countless hours thinking about memory and time and stories and family and landscaping and the economy and cooking for crowds and dream interpretation and communicating vision and web hosting -- and, yes, moles (did you know there are none in Ireland?) -- and frankly I sometimes just get tired of thinking.

So I'm considering all of that evidence of my own tunneling, sniffing my way along a process and a path, knowing that something new and noteworthy is about to pop up, that there's a whole lot of life under the surface in smaller yet vibrant spaces and that when the time is right there will be a different kind of evidence of me.  And that will have to do in lieu of a "regular" blog post.

In the meantime, I give you an excerpt (in italics below) to enjoy from Mary Karr's fantastic memoir, "Lit".  Her writing in this story shares the kind of energy I feel like I'm in these days...pithy, rich, reflective, basic, to the point, meandering, leaving some things unsaid but carrying much and being fully tuned in.  I also love the way they talk about God.  And that Mary Karr's healing involves a near-blind nun who has a weakness for cookies and a very wise heart.  If I were a nun I'd want to be like Sister Margaret.  The below is Mary's writing, not my own....it's not even necessarily relevant to what I've been thinking about, certainly not to moles, let alone to web hosting.  But sometimes in the tunneling we find other people's work & know that certain proteins in the roots are found in our own roots.

How do moles decide when to pop up?

***

The night after the train debacle, I drive under a sky black as graphite to meet my new spiritual director for the Exercises — a bulky Franciscan nun named Sister Margaret, patiently going blind behind fish-tank glasses that magnify her eyes like goggles.

Asked my concept of God, I mouth all the fashionable stuff — all-loving, all-powerful, etc. But as we talk, it bobs up that in periods of uncertainty or pain — forlorn childhood, this failed relationship — I often feel intentionally punished or abandoned.

How’s that possible, I say, if I have no childhood experience of a punishing God?

Margaret says, We often strap on to God the mask of whoever hurt us as children. If you’ve been neglected, God seems cold; if you’ve been bullied He’s a tyrant. If you’re filled with self-hatred, then God is a monster-making inventor. How do you feel sitting here with me now?

I don’t know, like some slutty Catholic schoolgirl.

She laughs at this and says, I see you — she peers through those lenses — what I can see of you, as my sister, God’s beloved child. The hairs on your head are numbered, and we’ve been brought together, you and me, to shine on each other a while.

So you don’t judge me? I want to know.

For what? she said. I don’t even know you.

Well, I say, I’m not married, and I aspire to be sexually active again some day.

She says, I’m not naive. But Jesus might ask: Should you be vulnerable to a man without some spiritual commitment? Is that God’s dream for you?

God has a dream for me? I say. I love that idea. It sounds like a Disney movie.

I know, Margaret says. Her pale round face opens up. Everybody uses the phrase God’s will or plan. That has a neo-Nazi ring to it.

I like the Disney version.

I feel you, she says, and I sit for a minute silently disbelieving she’s a nun. She adjusts her heavy glasses, and her eyes once again magnify.

Let’s eat a cookie and pray for each other’s disordered attachments, she says. Mine involves pride and cookies.

Mine, I say, involves pride and good-looking men.

Together we bow our heads.