Hiding from Love

Journal & Essays

Do you know what it’s like to be loved? Or do you hide from the force that gives you life? There are too many people who let love pass them by, expecting love to come packaged in a different form, a different person—and then they wind up alone and stuck in reminiscences about the days when love was knocking at their door, earnestly, only to be turned away.

Are you a person who is afraid of losing people?… If you don’t have the experience of losing someone, how can you be sure you’ve loved? I’m sure it’s possible, but the evidence is particularly sharp, particularly searing, when absence cuts in and steals the dance from you.

Wednesday Picnics

Short Fiction & Prose

Once upon a time, there was a lovely man who told me he loved me. He was kind and sweet and smelled of the rain. My favorite part of his face was his beard, which was scratchy enough to look a little gruff, but not so overgrown as to make him seem unkempt. His hair was dark, half-waved, half-curled, and it fell just a fraction below his ears (which sometimes embarrassed him because they were a bit on the large side). I thought he was, in fact, a very handsome man.

On Wednesday afternoons, we liked to walk to the park downtown and eat a picnic lunch. He always brought the sandwiches; I brought the crackers and cheese, plus a banana for him and an apple for me. If it was cold, I packed a thermos of soup and a mug of hot water for tea. I brought a blanket, too, but he usually wrapped himself around me so I wouldn’t be cold.

I remember him as being a very warm-bodied man. Sometimes I dreamed I’d run into him in a snow-storm and he’d be wearing just a shirt and shorts—no coat, no hat, no gloves—and yet, taking my hand, he’d feel so warm I’d forget it was a winter’s day.

This sounds silly and small, but he loved little things like that, and I did, too.

The Different Levels of Your Writing Self

Journal & Essays

You can write from different levels of the self: from the soul, from the deep mind, from the light and playful mind. Also from the emotions—which is, perhaps, to say—from the heart. The soul gives the clearest, cleanest prose, which rings with truth and is rich with depth. Some products of the mind can be scattered, anxious, forgettable—but some can give insight and order to a complex topic. I don’t know if it’s always possible to write strictly from the soul—or whether that’s even a desirable thing. I suppose you must speak from the place that has words to offer you at each particular instant of your life. What are the demands of your situation? What are the questions, and how can they be answered in the most helpful way (in a way that you—or others—will understand)?

Persisting through Doubt

Journal & Essays

LORD, sometimes my faith is in a crisis of doubt because it feels like all the things I’m hoping for—and all the things You seem to have counseled me to wait upon with trust—have failed to appear, have neglected to break upon the scene as promised.

Then I question whether my belief in You is really not just an illusion, conceived by the most hopeful part of my nature in an insistent desire to know that all will be well, and that there is a deeper, richer, more magical way of looking at life.

And in the face of people who would spurn Your existence, and tell me that my faith is only child’s play and in controversion of sound logical thinking—well, what can I say? I still believe, yet it must seem utterly foolish of me to persist. Why continue to trust when there is scant evidence that my trust is well-placed?

Nonetheless, GOD, my heart tells me that there is Truth in You, and my spirit is awakened to the strongest Love in Your Presence.

How can these things be explained to someone who thinks the mind is the King of our existence, that logic is the only path we have for arriving at truth?

GOD, the reasons I love You are simple and complicated all at once. But I know that, for You, the only thing that counts is the intention of the heart to act and live in love. You know my love for You, even as I am very imperfect at making it clear in the way I live.

It relieves me to know that Your ways are kindness and peace, and that the things You ask of me are not an impossible burden, but simply an invitation to a richer, more meaningful life.

Petite Poems

Poems

Poems small and weightless enough to blow away on the wind.

…

Gold leaf falling fast—
Catch the laughter as it flees!
The time for apples,
Ironed shirts, and holding hands
With handsome boys in woolen coats.

…

You forgot my name?
Ah, but look, it’s written there,
Rolled into your sleeve.

…

Kenji once cried so hard,
His tea leaves turned as salty
As the Pacific Sea.

…

Oh!
How
handsome
the swallows
are looking today,
now that their sorrowing is done.

…

Dear
sir—
If you
would like to
know if I love you,
come find me by the linden tree.

…

Pray, tell me
however you grew to be
so trapped inside my soul.

My heart hasn’t been this glad
since the day
I was born.

…

I cannot write these anymore,
I cannot write a poem.
All the fancy’s gone from me,
A long, long way from home.

 

A Troubled Heart

Poems

For a troubled heart, there is no relief;
For a wild encounter, no dressing of grief–
Only watching and waiting, suspecting the worst.
The king was a pauper, the blessèd were cursed

In a little-lamb town near the skirts of the bay—
The place where you wandered in the heat of the day.
The villagers say they saw you in tears,
The countrymen claim you’ve been missing for years,

Trapped, as it were, in the trappings of doubt–
A bloom of near-darkness, a sinner devout–
The things of this world were falling away.
The best you could do was kneel and pray.

But why spend your toil when no one would hear?
And why waste your hours in trembling and fear?
When the person you called on was never at home
And the lover you leaned on was lost in his dome—

Aloft in a tower, aloof of the cries
Of the woman who wails, the child who sighs.
A simpler man might find it half-strange
To live in a house so crudely arranged.

But who are the voices that people your head?
And what are the longings that call you instead?
Young hearts are beating, the day-book is read,
The soldiers are dancing, the dogs have been fed.

“Now, listen, o God, I’m dying to know
What songs I’ve been singing, what seeds I should sow!
My patience, o Lord: a light growing dim.
I’m losing the will— —to follow Him.”

Snatches of Encouragement

Journal & Essays

Today is a day for new beginnings. No matter what turmoil you’ve fought your way through—no matter how badly you’ve stained your trousers and coat with the muck of a difficult life—you are given this gift of hope, which is the power to choose what you will do and who you will be today.

…

How many times have you walked into a room and felt yourself ill at ease, a spectacle of nonbelonging in a place clearly occupied by people who, so calmly and cooly, manage to fit in? If you’ve ever felt this way—or perhaps you have a well-worn habit of feeling just so—I tell you to take heart, because it is people like you (the ones who feel placeless in so many places) who have the power to be at home in their own souls.

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