Three Easy Steps

Journal & Essays

Finding the way to tell a friend you love him: three easy steps.

First, you follow the trail of your heart to the place where love boils up and spills over, so that it’s clear how much you desire to be united with this person of your dreams.

Second, you ask God for the grace to know if this union is ordained, if this bringing-together of souls is something that will be blessed with light and love and beauty and peace. If the answer is yes, you find the confidence to ask Him for an unfolding of this love in the most beautiful way.

Third, you find the courage to speak to the beloved. You tell him in simple terms how very much he means to you and how very much you care. Don’t spend too much time looking for the words; they will come out of the fullness of your heart, tumbling forth in a natural way, because your love is simple and pure.

Don’t be dismayed if he doesn’t seem to respond right away. Words of real love take time to digest and they require a thoughtful reply. Sometimes, the recipient of a great love isn’t ready to receive such love into his quarters; first, he may need to work on expanding himself so there will be room for this noble and expansive kind of passion inside. It’s easy to feel discouraged, but take heart, because when you love without counting the cost, and when God has promised you a beautiful ending to the dreams of your heart, you may walk with the peace of knowing that all is well, and all is light.

For nothing shall stand in the way of two souls cut of the same cloth, striving – unwittingly or not – to find their solemn and perfect and crazy match.

A Fool with a Weakness for Hope

Journal & Essays

Don’t fear what comes next. The most beautiful part of life is falling in love with what is good. When you learn to put aside your selfish ways, you find yourself happier and more satisfied than before. Whoa – the tables have turned and there’s sense in the paradox. What do you think you were given a mind for? To keep everything nice and neat? Or to test the boundaries of what is true and discover for yourself the wideness of the world?

…

Once there was a man whom you loved. He carried himself tall and straight, with nothing but love in his heart. You thought it was magnificent, the way he learned to live in such an upright way – so you began to follow his steps and walk in the manner of his life. You couldn’t tell whether he was doing it out of joy, or out of a fear of doing wrong – sometimes the difference wasn’t so easy to see.

But whenever he asked you how you felt, whether you were happy or not – you felt a twinge in your heart that told you something was amiss. So finding the courage to examine your soul and look for the truth, you bid farewell to the man you loved and began to walk in the way you were called.

…

How the moths have found the way
to your drawers—
I haven’t a clue.

They’ve been waiting for years
just to find the food
of your sweeter,
sadder
lives.

…

Well, the weather is nice. The weather is fine. When it comes to the art of finding Truth, you must be scrupulous in discerning yourself. Yes, you must spare no effort to uncover the motives and promptings of your heart, and make yourself free as a bird to be led in the direction of Truth – unanchored to the desires you have for This to be So and That to be Such. You must desire Truth more than you desire the fulfillment of any particular wish, for otherwise your scales will be unbalanced and your quest for justice will be tipped askance.

…

Be a friend to those who need you.
Be a mother to those who fear.
Be a lover to those who long.
Be a teacher to those who seek.
Be a daughter to the One who made the Heavens and the Earth.
And all shall be well,
All shall be well.

…

Can you find me?
I am lost in the hallways of despair,
flashing my light
into the infinite underground.

…

Boo! The magic of the season has stolen your wits away.

…

Please, my GOD, point me in the direction of peace.
Show me the way to live a holy life, devoted to You.
Teach me how to fall in love so recklessly that my heart has never felt so big and full of joy.
Let me rejoice in the truth of a more beautiful existence – let me believe in the goodness and beauty of Your ways.
Let me Trust in You as You ask me to.

…

Elizabeth here. When I want to say something, I can and I will. The only trouble is, my thoughts often repeat themselves, and they make a broken record sound nice. You know, it’s hard to shake the habit of worry, the habit of trying to control and maneuver all the little things that give me pause.

I try to wrap myself in a perfect ball – seamless, polished, unimpeded, whole. But what a lot of self-torment goes into the process – trying to keep everything in line. To be the captain of such a provincial ship – there is no honor in that. Fussing over all the domestic details that should be left to GOD. What un-freedom in the act of trying to turn oneself into a science experiment, always recalling, scrutinizing, and questioning the effects of every morsel of food ingested, the length of every step taken. Hello! We are called to a larger life than this. “Don’t worry about your life, what you will eat. Don’t worry about your body, what you will wear.”

I’ve become an expert in micromanagement – to what avail? The honor is unwanted, is without grace. I’ve not even been successful in attaining the outcomes I purport to ratchet under my command. It’s clear that my surrender and trust work far more miracles than my attempts to control.

Why is this such a hard lesson to learn? I thought I was a good student – so why do I need the lesson repeated so many times?

…

My fear is that I’m insane. I’m worried I’ve lost the truth – or maybe never had it at all. What I mean is – my inner voice keeps compelling me to believe in certain things, and yet the outer world doesn’t align. I’m always so confused by the uncertainty of life – everything seems wrong and right all at once. My inner voice (let’s call it that for simplicity) is one of the only things cutting through the chaos and leading me by a surer, more encouraging path. And to be confronted with the possibility that this voice has been only a product of my own imagination, a projection of my own desires – and not a reliable guide to Truth, a beautiful communion with GOD – leaves me stuck, at a standstill, uncertain of everything, not knowing What is true or Whom to trust…. And yet, my simple heart continues to believe. Does that make me insane? Or just a fool with a weakness for Hope?

The Freedom that Comes from Being Light

Journal & Essays

When the world becomes too much to bear, the only response is to stop and throw all of your cares to the wind. The freedom that comes from being light – how can anything compare?

…

Years ago, a worker sat down to rest from his job at the factory. His hand was hurting him and his head ached. All of a sudden, there arrived in his mind this thought: “Why do you worry about your body when it is your soul that is sick?” He was dumbstruck and couldn’t move for a minute or more. When he finally came to, he felt a sensation growing inside his stomach – a warm tingling he hadn’t felt before. “Where did it come from?” he asked. “I ate but an hour ago. Besides, this is not hunger, but something more.”

When at last he heard the bells signaling the return to his post, he stood to go. But first, he breathed deeply and said: “The LORD has come upon me today and asked me to change. My answer now determines whether I shall live a free man, or whether I shall die a slave to the torments of a lesser power.” Saying this, he collected himself and turned the corner, lit with a glow before unknown to him. The Spirit of Life took hold of him from that point on, and he became a holy man whom many loved and desired to be near.

…

What a way to explain the aches of a sorrowful heart. What a way to understand the powers of a force you can’t contain. When you stop to consider how far apart the people have grown – how distant from each other they’ve become – you realize that someone must act, something must move. But how, but why, but who? Your chaos divides you in two and there is little room for the pleasures of a simple life devoted to love.

…

Four winds from every way
blew toward a single spot.
I came and stood amidst them all
and lost myself in thought.

…

Lo, how a rose e’er blooing—
petal, petal, petal—free
me from the garden of impossible
woes.

…

Be yourself, be free.
The simplest thing to do
is breathe.

…

Wow, my gosh almighty – what a looker you are. What a pretty little thing on the verge of growing up. When the time comes for courting, you’ll be the first one swept off your feet.

Night-time Question

Journal & Essays

Can you hear the people sing? All the voices are drowning in the echoes of their sweet refrain. But why don’t you keep asking for peace, so that, when it comes, you’ll have nothing to ask for but thanksgiving?

When the moment is lost to more than the sound of truth, you can only ask for the grace to be patient. It’s no longer a question of who is right and who is wrong – no, instead, it’s a matter of principle, a matter of fact or tact, as the case may be. You can only begin to understand once you’ve swallowed the poisonous lies and spit them out. Wave by wave, the sense crashes upon you in a rhythm that calms your mind.

Shakespeare wrote a hundred plays he didn’t use. No, that’s not right – but who’s to say he didn’t? The thing about truth is that it’s difficult to take in big doses. Only those who can handle a day of turning in bed, sick with the stomach-flu, can begin to acknowledge the process of understanding what’s right.

Oh, say can you see. The wind blows through your hair and you remember the word you were looking for. The word you meant to say so long ago to the one you loved. How did you manage to let him go? The wonderful thing about life is that the ebb and flow never stops – one rises, one falls, and the current drives you forward even in the midst of pain. Stupidly beautiful, in its way.

Then, all that remains is a question you must ask yourself at night, when the lights are low. The question is simple: how do you find the will to live? The answer depends on the state of your heart and the state of your mind. If you’d rather take a different tack and pursue the meaning of other things – you may, and you should, but the heart will not rest until the soul is content with your reply. Content with the knowledge that all you live for is safely tucked away in the deepest corners of your being, impervious to the whims of time and luck and the pain of things getting hard.

Star of the Sea

Journal & Essays

Written from the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

What happens when you follow a dream, only to have it plucked from your grasp and torn into shreds? It’s true, you know, that sometimes people miss out on their dreams. Sometimes the heart’s desire isn’t fulfilled. What happens then? What happens to one’s sense of poetic justice in the face of such idealistic collapse? The dreamers aren’t very skilled at recovering from the shock. It’s not in their nature to contend with such ugly truths. A poetic soul is grieved at the loss of beauty inherent in an unrealized dream. The beauty fades, the beauty dies. What is life without beauty?

Can you see the way I’m pining for something more? Can you see how my longing has turned into something all-engrossing, something that won’t be ignored? I’m not sure how to say the things I want to say. The thoughts are big, too elusive for me to catch. But the important thing is to try, to catch the fragments of light that come and put into words what we can. Then we will have a starting point, then we will find a way to build into something more.

Love is always on the tongue. Love is always in the heart. Your senses are clear, clean – like crystal-glass – easy to break, easy to see right through. If GOD had wanted me to be a happy soul, He would have made my heart of sturdier things. But now that He has not – what do I make of that?

The heart so full of longing that it spills over like the sea – a rough-and-tumble CRASH of wave upon wave, onto the shores of a distant land. The horizon never meets the sky – only appears that way. A long-appointed kiss, delayed until the waiting can sustain itself no longer – an explosion of desire on the cusp of the world, the edge of the ocean.

How can we explain such things?

Find me someone who knows the way to peace and I will show you the makings of a perfect man. The sun shines warm on the face of those who keep their heads high, and their humility grounded – mostly because there are too many things to infuriate the people who live life in complicated ways. The simple will prevail.

Star of the sea—
Find me
a place to call my own.

The waves are crashing,
the wind is free—
All I wish to be
is me.

…

What windy days, what burning questions in need of watering down. I can’t find how to bring it all together in a meaningful way.

My GOD is inscrutable to me, I cannot hear His voice. I am lost at sea without a compass to chart my course—no map to guide my ways. How will I contend with reality in the face of such illusion? How will I move in the absence of anything to tell me to “walk this way”? My faith: a little string of kelp caught in the rudders of our ship, dangling and swaying like crazy to be set free.

How am I to persist when I haven’t the faintest clue what is up and what is down? The emptiness of losing the Friend who has your heart inside His own – how can you put the desolation into words? My hand is weak, my mind is numb. Save me from the thoughts that drown.

Quotations

Paradox is the intellectual life’s authentic pathos, and just as only great souls are prone to passions, so only great thinkers are prone to what I call paradoxes, which are nothing but grand thoughts still wanting completion.

Søren Kierkegaard

Quotations

Pain happens when you care.

Lisa Cuddy from House

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