the light that will not go out.

"It's not about being saints or sinners or good or bad, Fancy. It's about being both. You know? About being complete." Slice of Cherry, Dia Reeves

We were born out of darkness, with a light inside of us just waiting to burst forth into the night. Our eager souls were sure they could escape their fate and run on a cloud of dreams and glory until the very end. And so we avoided our shadows, despite the fact that they crept silently behind us for as long as we could remember.

We divided our world into categories--good and bad, saints and sinners, light and dark. We did this to make sense of things, to help our minds justify what our hearts were screaming to set right. It made us feel better, knowing what we could and could not be in a world so tightly wound in grey. I think our colors faded because of this, the ashen aspects of our days settling lazily on our bones, despite what we did to dust them off. We wanted to appear perfect and bright, almost as much as we wanted everyone else to.

I think somewhere we forgot that even the brightest star cannot exist without the darkness of night.

Our quest for light strained our capacity to make it. All the fragments that frayed my life, all the shattered glass-- it buried me. It buried me because I could not exist in a place that threatened my sense of control, in a place that was not bound up in rules and regulations, stipulations for goodness that I could strive into with all my might.

And so in my reckless fight against the night, I inevitably lost all the light I had ever tried to hold. I watched it spinning out further and further until it was swallowed up by the darkness--not the darkness that was natural to my existence, but the darkness that was wrapped up in avoidance and regret, shame and vulnerability.

I let the darkness define me, instead of finding a way to define the dark--I let my light go out.

This world will never exist without darkness, but we are mistaken if we think that we must exist without it. Even in darkness the light gives ways to all that our souls were created to follow, it allows for illumination and healing and joy, it lets us see all that is beautiful in this world.

We must not avoid the darkness for fear of the night. We must walk boldly forth, calm our nerves, quiet the voice that says, "this must not be" because in truth, it already is.

Often, our best qualities, our brightest lights, are also our darkest companions. The magic within us that allows us to breathe and create and connect can also be our greatest downfall. And yet, we must use all of ourselves in the battle, we must acknowledge the darkness in an effort to grab onto light.

And when you really think about it, we need a bit of the darkness within to face the darkness without. We cannot extinguish what we do not understand, and when we do, we must trust that our light is already there. We must trust because one cannot exist without the other. Where there is dark, there will always be the capacity for light.

In the beginning, God created the light, and saw that it was good. From the very start, he imagined a world where we would never be without light--without hope. And while he has promised to bring us into a land where tears and sorrow are known no more, he stands with us in the dark. He is there, even when we feel we cannot bare to face one more night. Even when we feel our light is fading, when we feel we cannot go on.

We have the capacity for dark and light--but this does not make us saints or sinners. It makes us stars, shining so bright in a universe of darkness that illuminates all the hope there is and ever is to be.

Do not be afraid of the darkness--of your darkness--let it only point you to the light of the heavens that will never, ever go out.

vertigo.

It's all spinning. Around and around and around. I see the pieces moving through the air, intricately entangled, beautiful in the dazzling light of summer. And yet, when I reach out, I grab hold of nothing. I see it there in front of me but somehow it remains faintly out of reach. I sink farther down, watching as my world passes me by.

I wonder what it would be like if it all stopped, frozen and glittering in the sun. What it would be like to sort through all the fragments, to examine them one by one. To know each part of my life intimately, in a way that brings understanding. Sometimes, I think I have finally closed my hand around something, I think I have finally stilled just the smallest part of my ever spinning galaxy. But alas, it wiggles just out of my fading grasp, just short of being contained for even the tiniest fragment of time. And I watch it quickly spin back into orbit, whizzing into the familiarity of the unreachable and unknown. 

I see it all happen around me, and I feel distant--cold even. The madness does not feel like it belongs to me, that it is even a part of my reality. It's both fascinating and frightening to observe, all those pieces flying about. It seems as though they should catch each other, collide with a brute force that is bound to blow up the entire universe. It seems that it all is headed for impending doom, for a black hole so deep and so dark that no light will ever escape it.

And then, silence. A pause. Stillness again, all those particles floating about, each in its own place, with its own journey, its own purpose. However could they all belong to me? No one person could contain all the burning stars, all the fury that these lights and litter contain. They can't be mine, they shouldn't be.

Then, with no warning, it begins to reverse, to spin around in the opposite direction, to turn everything upside down and impossibly backwards. It's all a jumble, a wild turning abyss that threatens to swallow me whole. I reach out to stop it, to flail wildly at the wind, to cover my eyes, my ears, my face, to pretend that its not really there at all. 

I find the lever. Push it back, turning turning turning with all my might. I set things forward, but not right. It's not the same. It cannot be. It will not be. 

But on and on the spinning goes. And so I recline, fade back into my existence, into my place as spectator. As removed from the calamity as I can be. I open my eyes. 

Vertigo. 

to be raised from the dead.

When we fight back with joy, we embrace the deepest reality of our identity, which is not a weary-beaten-down one but is a beloved-joyful-one//Margaret Feinberg

There's a thing that happens when you cry, or rather, when you are trying to keep yourself from crying, where your throat closes up and you feel like you are slowly being choked to death. The brain and body disagree, without reaching a true compromise--your thoughts commanding the tears to go back up into their rightful place, with your eyes mercilessly noncomplying. And you are fighting, tirelessly, to hold it all together. It's exhausting, this task, and at times you wonder if is worthwhile to keep trying.

It is from this place that I have slowly learned: you cannot shut your emotions down without killing a part of yourself.

Thus, an action that was meant to protect from vulnerability becomes a weapon disguised, Because something will always replace the emotions that you are trying so hard to forget, something will steal your hope. Will turn you into someone you don't recognize, will hollow you out until you become unfeeling and cold, devoid of the joy that was meant to light up your soul.

We become impenetrable and heartless, because the world has convinced us it is too much to bear.

And this is why, I think, our body responds the way it does when we try to keep ourselves from crying. From responding to the pain around us, from feeling every ounce of feeling this life has to offer. Our souls are screaming, out to our fingers and down to our toes and everything, everything hurts. We are connected, and love is a cost that does not come without loss. But our body knows the difference--knows that to keep it in is to deny truth, knows that we are breaking our spirit, suffocating the thing that makes us human.

And yet, it feels safer to kill hope. To walk through life with power, control firmly within our grasp. To know that we cannot be crushed if we simply do not believe in anything--if we take no chances on ourselves and others. We hide. And in doing so, we die.

Hope is a terrifying word. But in this time, at this hour, in the light of all that I have found about God to be true, it weighs so beautifully upon my shoulders. Because if I believe in the cross, if I believe...then my hope is not in vain. My feelings are not unanswered. My tears do not fall without purpose.

Because all the pain and sorrow that this world has thrown and has yet to throw at me shows me that there is something that is worth fighting for. That the battle to exchange hope for safety is an illusion, a poison that kills and not protects.And everything in me, even my tears, is telling me that I cannot deny hope the power it so undeniably has in every corner, every crevice of my heart. A heart that has been saved irrevocably by grace.

And so, I must choose hope to live.

One of my favorite stories in the Bible is the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. When his dear friend passed, Jesus responded with an all-encompassing, deep seated, excruciating sorrow that he did not try to stifle. And yet, he knew that he would see Lazarus alive and well, he knew that he would bring him back to life. He felt the pain, but fought back with life. With hope. He did not let his present reality rob him of the joy he knew was coming.

Don't let your fear of vulnerability win out. Let your tears come, messy though they may be.

It's the season for bringing things back to life.

Let your heart be the first of them.

the flavor of life.

I burn food a lot. Not intentionally, obviously--but while cooking, and often. Pasta, omelets, fish, quesadillas—there isn't a culinary quintessential that I haven’t royally screwed up.  It’s remarkable, really. I swear that I set out with all the best intentions and plans, but more often than not I cannot NOT burn something at least a little. The other day I put a sweet potato in the oven only to have the kitchen fill up with smoke ten minutes later. Turns out a cookie had dropped during my last baking expedition, and was now ablaze and impossible to retrieve. I had to let it burn out, which was both terrifying and also sort of beautiful, in a campfire kind of way.  

Since I’m human (and being so we like to accommodate to our weaknesses), I like to think of that toasty layer of my food as a “special seasoning”. Oh, you didn't want a dash of smoky flavoring? Sorry, and, eat it anyway. You think I would be better as a somewhat well-adjusted twenty five year old, but whatever. Usually I am the only recipient of my food and lucky for me I’m not a harsh critic. It’ll work itself out eventually.

In reality, however, the burnt nature of my food often spoils what could have been a pretty good meal. It cuts through all the other flavors, masking the careful effort I put into each layer of my dish. It prevents the food from being what it could be.

And what I realized is, fear is like this.

Life is offered to us, beautiful and whole and bright, and fear spreads like wildfire and burns it to the ground. First slowly, so that we don’t know it’s happening, then all at once. And our confidence is shaken. We stare sadly at the last of the glowing embers in front of us and wonder, how; how ever did that happen? We lose ourselves and turn up like burnt toast—dry, and ashen, void of all the flavors that we once held dear.

Now, I believe that there is a place for fear. It keeps us safe in many situations, warning us that there may be danger ahead. But sometimes, fear gets a little too bold, a little too comfortable in our bodies. It starts to spread to areas it’s not welcome, starts to impede upon our truth. It becomes almost a second language to us, telling us lies about ourselves and the years to come.

And we react to this in a myriad of ways. Some of us run, avoiding anything that may be too risky by making ourselves smaller than we really are. Others of us push forward, terrified that if we don’t keep producing the world will deem us unworthy. So we fluctuate between the two extremes, never whole, never stopping to realize that perhaps our fear is telling us the wrong thing.

Fear lets us know that something is worth fighting for. It alerts us to the sense that there is something that we love, something that we long for, something that we absolutely do not want to lose. This is why so many people fear death, failure, relationships, and much more. We don’t want to watch what is meaningful to us burn down; we don’t want to experience loss in so many ways.

And that is OK. Being afraid is OK. It’s not weakness, but incredible strength. The trick is not to let our fear get the best of us—not to let it be our reality. Emotions come and go like the weather. A storm does not indicate that the world will always be dark and grey, and fear doesn't either. We get to choose what our fear tells us, how we wish to use it.

And so, I am learning to push through the storm and fight back the fear. I am learning, as Susan Jeffers put it, to “feel the fear and do it anyway”. We must keep cooking, even when it all turns up burnt. We must exercise our right to believe in ourselves and the supreme goodness that is living and falling and getting back up and doing it all over again. Most importantly, we must not be afraid of fear. 

It’s only a little smoky flavoring, after all. 

worthy of our sufferings.

"They must not lose hope but should keep their courage in the certainty that the  hopelessness of our struggle did not detract from its dignity and meaning" Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

I feel that my life has been stolen from me. It didn't happen all at once, but so slowly and in much the same way that a plant dies. The petals fall day by day until finally, all that is left is a sad, lifeless stalk that once seemed to radiate with beauty.

I blame New York for the thievery. I came here on a dollar and a dream, so sure that this is where my life would actualize. So sure that this was were I would become my truest self, where I would buy back all the years that I felt were wasted on a person that was only waiting to be born.

But the opposite has happened. And honestly, who of us can look at our life and feel that we are where we thought we would be at this time? Life is full of regret, and very little satisfaction. We wander, restless down to our bones and unsure that we will ever be filled. We search, earnestly, for that which can bring us life.

We search.

And sometimes, we remember. We find that which we clung to in difficulties before, we find what our souls were made to take comfort in. But we also find that we have new questions, new sufferings. We think we have learned, adjusted to the path that we have journeyed on for so many lonely years. But this is life, and we never will get a perfect score. We keep learning, keep growing, keep facing new challenges until we realize--life does not get easier.

We must get stronger.

So we linger on the other side of resiliency, staring at the road before us and trying to find a way to cut corners. We want anything but to go through it, to face whatever it is that we fear most, We want to be able to look it in the eye and proudly stand straight and tall--to go into battle with our heads lifted high, but this is no easy task. It's certainly not for the faint of heart or for the easily distracted. It requires determination and focus, it requires fortitude. It requires us to look beyond ourselves and our immediate sufferings, to realize that our sufferings can impact change. To acknowledge that though our pain threatens to take us under, it is our pain that eventually leads us to rise.

And in this place, it is not hope that propels us forward. It is faith. Faith that our suffering does in fact produce perseverance.  And that perseverance, though it bleeds us dry, will eventually construct character out of the dust our weary feet have left behind.. Because hope is not born out of knowing where we are going.. It is born out of not knowing anything at all, except that light always overcomes the darkness.

Frankl speaks constantly of "being worthy of our sufferings". And in this small insight, he has named our entire existence--to have courage, to hope in the face of insurmountable odds, to believe that there is dignity and grace and meaning that makes our struggle worthwhile.

This week, one of my clients said (with little words and profound wisdom) that our time spent wandering the desert would come to a close much quicker  if we just acknowledged why we were there in the first place. Though I've studied Isaiah many times, there was something about the sincerity of this statement and the humility in his understanding of it that struck me by surprise. Not necessarily why we were there, insomuch as the things that may have edged us closer to our own particular  wasteland. But why we were there--the meaning for our lives and the lives of those around us. What we were meant to accomplish in the desert, what we are meant to create.

Because, to grow something out of pain--to see a bloom rising up out of the cracks and in spite of its environment, that is true hope. It is one that has been firmly rooted and is ready to weather the elements.

It is hope that cannot be taken away from us, for generations to come. It can be passed down, passed around and instilled in those around us.

And just like wildflowers, once it takes flight, it cannot be stopped. It is infectious and true in the best possible way, it is all-encompassing.

So that very slowly, but with great certainty, the desert is outgrown--leaving behind a garden bursting with more life than we ever dreamed or imagined--leaving behind evidence of what we so craved and never thought we would achieve:

a reason to hope.

strength to strength.

Blessed are those whose strength is in you, whose hearts are set on pilgrimage. Psalm 84:5

If I had to describe my current state to someone, I think I would say my soul is paralyzed and my body is on permanent auto-pilot. I would say that I feel nothing, but that would be a lie. These days I seem to feel everything, so acutely and in such a deep manner that it makes it hard to breathe. Feeling is excruciating sometimes isn't it? Our emotions rub raw until our heart is bleeding and our bones are aching, and we don't think that it is possible to take in so much pain. But then we do, and every time we aren't quite sure we are going to escape alive.

I used to jump into those emotions, feel everything naked and free. I didn't know how to boundary myself, how to separate from the burdens of others. Some days it felt like I could feel every nerve, every flinch of the emotional whip that kept my counterparts running for safety. Because isn't that what we all want? To feel safe and loved, to know that our hurts can be contained by another and not rejected, to know that someone is still reaching out with an open hand despite what we've brought to their doorstep?

Either way we journey on, holding our sorrows as if they are our prized possessions--afraid to put them down lest we lose ourselves to the chaotic tide that threatens to pull us under. We are delicate, on edge knowing that at any moment it may all be washed away around us. So we find ways to be brave, or rather to put ourselves back together just long enough until we can fall apart once again.

And we call this living. 

Going from one thing to the next, until we realize that life does not get easier--we just learn better survival skills. 

Because it's all a wilderness, and safe havens are hard to find. And we want to bunker down, build a fire and watch the flame burn out till all is dark, all is safe. But we can't, because we have to survive. We have to pick ourselves back up, find ways to go on living.

And we are so very afraid. We feel frayed around the edges, vulnerable and exposed, as if all our skin had worn thin and there was nothing left to protect our fragile bodies from the elements. It seems as though everyone is looking, waiting, watching as we become wide eyed and hysterical, tumbling through the wreckage of our lives looking for anything that will ground us, anything that will remind us, anything that will let us feel like the world is not spinning out of control. 

Everything feels impossible in this place. The resistance alone makes us feel that we would rather die than try to fight the fear that courses through our veins with such intensity, poisoning every hope we had that life could be manageable. It seems that we cannot change, cannot grow courage out of the hollow space that has only ever echoed our firm belief that we will never be enough. 

But what if instead of choosing to believe that we aren't we choose to believe that we are? What if we always, always choose hope over despair, promise over prosperity, life over death? Would it be a life wasted, if we only found out that it was all dark in the end? Because hope doesn't always mean an outcome, sometimes it is a state of being. That there is hope in our ability to withstand pain, and keep on grasping for joy and light and life even when death threatens to squeeze it all out of us. Even when it feels that the walls are closing and the truth is setting in and it's not worth it to go on trying anymore. We must listen to that still, small voice, we must go from strength to strength, we must set our hearts on pilgrimage. 

Though the journey is long, and our heads are heavy, we must put one foot in front of the other and keep looking up. We must hope beyond hope--we must believe that our moments matter. That the outcome does not define the journey, that though we don't know what the hell we are doing we refuse to rest in the confines of hell. 

Feel the fear, but reach for courage. Build a shelter, weather the storm. We need the rain to keep growing, though at times we feel we will surely drown. 

God never wastes our pain. Let's not waste our hope. 

make hope.

I've lost myself these days. I feel my soul drifting farther and farther away from everything around me, falling silently into a fog that thickens every day. I'm not sure what to blame it on really. So much has happened in these last four months that it's hard to place the blame. All I know is that I woke up today and felt like a shadow of myself, and I'm not sure how to get back to living.

It's different than the depression that I've experienced in the past. I'm less surprised by the feeling, black and sticky and suffocating like always. I don't feel panicked by it, I'm not fighting. In fact I think I've given up. Lost hope. And it's not that I don't believe there is hope to be found, it's just that I'm too tired to find it. To go looking for it, because sometimes it's so damn hard to find. I've given up the battle and I'm too weary to even wave the white flag of peace.

So I lay down, and stare at the world as it passes me by.

Sometimes, I miss who I was. I look back at the two years I had before here, and I see such joy, such ambition. Even as I moved to New York, I felt a passion and a promise that I was where I was supposed to be.

Then the universe met my belief with a resounding knock-out that left me face down and heartless. The hope that I had splattered the walls around me, dripping down and drying out, the last reserve of what was left. And so I died. Inside and out, as everything within and around me became grey and lifeless.

So I walked in this fog, seeing but not feeling, taking in but not touching. And what I saw did not move me, but left me paralyzed instead. I stopped engaging, because to engage meant to hurt. It meant I had to reconcile and change, it meant I had to work. And I did not think that I could work to watch one more thing fail, to see one more loss in my life.

Because to lose what you have worked so hard to keep is like losing air to breathe as you drown--you see it happening yet you can't do anything to change it, watching all you love go to waste as you die.

But the thing about life is we only have two choices--to succumb to the waves or find a way to stay afloat. It's not about whether we live or die--that's all relative. It's whether we are choosing to swim or not--whether we choose to move forward towards land no matter how dismal the chances we will make it may seem. Because either way we are going to die--but I want to die living.

People often tell me I have a pretty smile. It's a nice compliment, and I try to take it gracefully. Most people don't know that I have nine cavities. I went for twenty-three years of my life never having one, and then somehow managed to gain almost a dozen in one visit. I still to this day wonder whether or not the dentist was a liar--seeing damage where there actually was none. I should have gotten a second opinion. But the fact is I didn't, and now I live with nine metal fillings that will one day lead to what I am sure to be a full set of dentures. But none the less I take the compliment and smile anyway because really that's all there is to do.

And isn't life like that sometimes?  We smile even though it's not real. We want to pretend and play along with others, so we do what we need to get through the pleasantries. But inside we are screaming, gasping for air. Asking anyone to save us, to make us feel anything. To lift the fog and pump blood back into our veins, to shatter our paralyzed features and warm our souls once again.

But no one else can do that for us. Only we can.

And we will. Because when we are all alone in the middle of the deepest waters, we remember what we are made of. We find the strength to move forward in the shadowed corners of our being, and we begin to swim again. And while we aren't sure if we'll make it and don't know what we'll find once we arrive, we will know that we did not waste our living. We did not throw away our precious breaths or still our beating hearts willingly.

We made hope where there was none, and let it be the anchor for our souls.

And thus we believed once again.