discombobula

As Big or as Small as Things Wish To Be

susieq@gotalk.net.au (Sue) — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 08:47:00 +0000

When I was younger, I went about for years and years stuffing my feet into shoes that were too small for me. I do not remember now how I came to realise that the real size of my feet was one whole size larger than what I had been wearing, but now it baffles my brain and saddens my heart. Four of my toes had developed lumps on the top of each from the friction of cramping and shoving my feet into shoes that were too small for me and yet I wore size eight and a halfs for years and years, somehow blind to what was right in front of my eyes and right at the end of my legs, cramping my comfort.

I feel dissatisfied with the last blog post I wrote. Not because of its content, but because I tried to fit so much into one post. Some people write posts and realise that what they are looking at has enough breadth to call it a series and write four posts. I try to stuff everything I am thinking into one and do people's heads in in the process.

I do not want to have to wait. After I have begun writing, and the thoughts keep coming, and I add another paragraph and another paragraph until I have 47 of them, the only thing that stops me from saying, "Right then, this is actually four blog posts then, isn't it" is the desire for the instant gratification when I Pavlovianly press "publish post," and the disinclination to have to put in the effort of writing four posts because suddenly it feels like work and not like fun.

But things are their own shape and size and space and length and breadth. The only time they begin feeling like work and like a chore are when I have expectations other than the size and length that they are showing me that they actually are, and the desire to move onto the next thing instead of staying right here.

Ultimately, what it comes down to is a deep and unconscious belief that what is right here in front of my nose is not worthy enough to breathe and focus on it. This leads to all sorts of creepinesses, like treating the person in front of you like something in your way, like treating yourself as less than you actually are. Sort of like psychological and spiritual leprosy .

I am redrafting the first short story I have managed to finish for several years. It's all over the shop at this early stage. I hardly even know what it's about. I keep reminding myself that it takes time, that it's sitting bubbling away on about four stove backburners and that the work knows its own shape. I must let it be as big or as small as it wishes to be.

Good Prayer/Bad Prayer

susieq@gotalk.net.au (Sue) — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 23:29:00 +0000

I came across a blog post about centering prayer recently where the writer was roundly condemning it as a tool of the devil. Which quite befuddled me for a few seconds while I got my bearings on how he was viewing it. Everybody has their own worldview and everybody is informed by that. I left a comment detailing my experiences, hoping to be able to have some sort of a conversation, but the problem often is that Christians are encouraged not so much to love their enemies but that interacting with them will taint us somehow. "Love your enemies," Jesus said but we prefer to retreat into safe notions of black and white because we are fearful of being deceived. Such a vital element of the human condition, that when someone is in error, we want to send them scapegoated out into the wilderness, keep ourselves pure. And so therefore this man did not respond to my blog comment. This is common enough behaviour in blogland, but it still pisses me off.

I have been thinking so much recently about what prayer is. Even if he did not want to enter into a conversation with a heretical being, the mental dialogues (arguments) I had with him in my own head were quite edifying anyway, to help me identify to myself what I think prayer is. Because the longer I go on doing it, the more mysterious it becomes to me. And I think in some ways too I am still trying to differentiate between meditation and prayer. Meditation feels like preparation for prayer in some ways while it also feels like prayer at the same time (and I am using the words "meditation" and "centreing prayer" interchangeably here, just to muddy the waters further.)

I think it is that severe differentiation between prayer and meditation, Western and Eastern concepts, and the fears that come along with those differentiations that cause many Christians to fear the idea of using a "mantra" as a scary, demonic thing. The man on the blog I commented on said that using a mantra is the same as the "repetitively babbling" we are admonished to not employ as our method of prayer. He also said that this sort of prayer is found nowhere in the Bible, and to that I concur. Not found in a six step methodology. But neither are millions of other things. As far as Bible verses go, the "be still and know that I am God" is the very foundation from where I do these practices, and it is also prayer in its most basic form to me. Jesus said "When you pray, do it like this," but is that where it ends? Is prayer the rote repetition of "Our father in heaven?" Does that not bring us full circle back to the "repetitious babbling" I was just talking about?

And anyway, as far as I am seeing it right now, my use of a mantra is purely as a box to put my monkey mind in. The real effect of using a mantra is actually silence in the end. Those verses that talked about repetitive babbling seem to me to really be talking about not praying in a way where you feel you are not being heard, or in an egotistical sort of a fashion that involves big grand prayers to be heard by God. That is part of what those verses mean to me. Using a mantra is not so much something I am doing to God as it is a way for me to harness my anxious mind so that I am free to enter into being still and knowing that he is God. But I understand why he thinks the way he does about it, I really do. I'm not critical of his observations, but I do think that he perhaps misunderstands the differences. But I could be wrong. I suppose I often am.

How delightful it is to see the Bible in a place where I am still allowed to have my own thoughts and come to my own conclusions. It is something like having the law being begun to be written on your heart instead of it sitting inside a tome I must consult outside myself. More scary, more room for error, sure. And so much more real.

I understand why that man would consider using mantras and repetitive babbling to be much the same as the other, and I also understand from him thinking that that he has no real experience or understanding at all of what he condemns except for what Apprising Ministries has informed him is the evil thing.

What gets me about Christians also is that our thinking is the outrcrop of a childish black and white view of things, our segregating things up into neatly packaged little sections with "Christian" over here and "evil" over there, and "prayer" being the reciting of words in our head (without ceasing? Goodness me, how exhausting then, if that's what it is. I like this version better).

When we have that idea, about being a pure unblemished people set apart from the evil in the world, we are unable and unwilling to see our faith centred in his historical space, nor to see the common heritage it shares with other cultures and other religions. Looking at things in this way, we think that, for example, if we practice yoga asanas that therefore we are practising something "Hindu." We think that meditation is something those Buddhists do, so they've already claimed it and it can't be something that Christians also do, because if we do, then that is just the one world religion. I understand the fear of people who do not want to be led astray and deceived, who want to be faithful to God. To each his own apprising of his conscience, you know? All those verses speaking of not eating meat sacrificed to idols are necessary for us to heed because Western 21st century Christians have the most soft and spongy consciences.

But some of us are free to eat meat sacrificed to idols. As far as I see it these days, yoga practice is a philosophy of the body that was learnt by a bunch of people in a particular time and place that had stacks of knowledge about how our bodies work. They happened to have as their religion the Hindu one. I'm more interested in the people these days. Whatever religion they happen to be is of secondary importance to me. I do not think that God is centred within all religions. I do however think he is centred within Humanity. I think all people have access to God if they so desire to.

And so this man on this blog could look at the methods of centreing prayer and say that they were wrong because they were "Eastern". And Eastern gets equated with Buddhism and other religions which everyone knows have nothing of value to benefit us poor Christians cut adrift from our heritage in so many ways (which reminds me, I still haven't written about my thoughts on the Passover meal. Such a beautiful thing! The history of the Jews' wilderness wanderings, played out ... in food! God is so embodied! Like playing dress-ups. Makes the modern thimble of grape juice and bit of Salada so uncreative in comparison).

And so we are taught that we can't let the worldviews gleaned from any other religion inform us and teach us because that is indulging in false gods. Well, I say that when you get to a certain point of faith in God you become free to eat the meat that is sacrificed to idols and there is nothing in there that can taint you. And yet there's a wisdom that comes too. I do not know why but several years ago I desired to return to practicing yoga but for me it felt wrong. At that time it did feel like I was doing something that was somehow wrong to me at that particular time. To have indulged in it would have been stupid, even if only for the fact that I would have felt guilty, and guiltily practising asanas brings all sorts of physical problems when you're contorted up on your mat. Just no need to go there.

But no need now not to go there.

Eastern religions have plenty to inform me about the inklings I have, the things that I feel I am learning from living within this Matrix, to learn to see in the ways God is teaching me to learn to see, to move forward within my own faith, because my faith has its roots in Eastern thinking. Because so many people are looking to the affairs of the world and seeing antichrist brewings and one world religions festering (I do not criticise that; I see many of those sorts of things myself) they automatically presume, the same mistake made over again and again, that to keep our religion pure and unblemished, to remain undeceived, is to retreat into our own camp of "Christianity" and to do "Christian" things and see life in from a "Christian" worldview.

To live out of fear. I do not want to live out of fear. I would rather sin boldly in my pursuit of life and the Father rather than to fear with that horrible Pentecostal fear that takes all of the evils of the world - the one world governments and evil politicians and systemic crushings - and makes it the centre of everything.

God is the centre of everything. That shit is happening in the world. I refuse to let "Christianity" teach me to lose my focus. I trust God to help me maintain that. And he does.

Changes Come

susieq@gotalk.net.au (Sue) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 11:39:00 +0000

I'm watching The Abbey at the moment. This three part doco is about five women who spend five weeks at an enclosed Benedectine monastery, Jamberoo Abbey in New South Wales.

I kept thinking as I was watching it (I've got one episode to go), "How will these women be able to cope if they go into something like this, such a discipline, without the love behind it to fuel it?" you know? Sort of like an arranged marriage, getting married to someone you don't love. Or like getting out of bed every night for months on end in the middle of the night to feed a Tamagotchi instead of a baby. Or like being a Fundamentalist Christian ;)

And so I admired these women for doing what they were doing. And at the same time I was surprised and gratified anew at the beauty and grace of God. S/he's just everywhere, taking us now, taking us on. Pretty cool.

So much about that sort of life appeals to me, you know? Not that there is any sort of a calling there, even without the 4.30 am vespers (is it vespers? I can't remember). No thanks, very much. But it's funny how things change; where once I may have looked askance at a bunch of Benedictine nuns, these days I see the way they are living their lives as something of quite rare beauty. The ritual, the turning aside to prayer seven times a day, the structure, the silence, the craftwork, the gardening. The mindfulness, a life spent praying without ceasing. The work. The rhythm.

Till the day they die. Wow.

I once used to wonder how that sort of a life would have any kind of value to God. And yet I couldn't help imagining as I was watching it how God must be particularly fond of this bunch of women. So much of their lives resonate with me; I see so much of my own life in theirs, too, though our lives are so very different.

And I think I am beginning to understand a little the topsy turvy nature of things, the first being last, the hidden being of great value, the things that we have been squeezed into thinking are important are actually the things that kill, the spirit that we think is gonna kill us (and who does) bringing life.

All topsy turvy.

Shallows Breathing

susieq@gotalk.net.au (Sue) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 09:33:00 +0000

You feel tonight like a tiny pebble. A tiny pebble on the sand. Surrounding you, ripples of water. Radiating out far beyond your vision. The golden ball has begun its dance underneath your feet into someone else's sunrise; yet in your mind, these ripples all have golden edges though the moon casts silver.

Grounded into this small space you occupy on this earth, feeling your smallness, it makes you vast. Always biggest when you are smallest, always fullest when you are empty handed. You are like one of those rippling waves in the ocean.

So often you feel like a chafing horse, sweating your flanks, chewing your bit. Eager for life, thirsty for it, so thirsty it's aching your bones, yearning for more of what your life is to grow into. Pregnant with the feel of that so that sometimes your back aches and your head droops and you don't believe it even though it's growing in your belly and heaving you down.

But tonight you sit grounded into the sand with the water rippling. No yearning can grip you for long with the gentle pull and push of the tide to bring you back to here. Deep down the very end of your spine, like the tail of a fish, outstretches from your body like red ripple roots, holding you fast to your seat on this chair in front of this computer writing these words spreading you out into the ocean.

You yearn but it is not - at least tonight - a frantic grasp for more, more more. It does come from a deep, deep thirst. Sometimes you grasp because of the gasp, because of the thirst encircled right in the centre of your bones. And anyway, the grasping is what you have learnt to do. From the fear.

But you go with the tide. You do not want to lurch out on your own onto the waves. You sit here in the shallows. You see the ripple curves on the sand underneath you. You do not need to grasp. The universe is contained in any of these grains of sand.

You mark in the darkness above you the position the sun will take when it arches itself up close to the centre of the sky tomorrow. The moon, recently full, its tidal pull on these waters surrounding you, its tidal pool in you, from within your own womb, drawing you forth by its rhythms. This brother moon, this sister sun. Where is there to go but here?

Where else shall we go? You alone have the words of life.

You have so many thoughts and ideas and feelings in your head and heart about things you would like to do - intentional community ideas, moving to the Dandenongs ideas, the ever-present delight of your writing practice and exploring the boundaries of your creativity, the desire for more friendships, for companionship, opening yourself up to the thought of opening yourself up to the idea of opening yourself up to an other (like a multi-faceted rather complex flower, after being so closed down).

And so you hope. So many of your attempts to move out into the wider ripples have fallen somewhat flat. But right now, tonight, you just are. You're here and you are. You feel it on the night air, a breath, so imperceptible that you wonder if you imagined it up out of your own head or heart. "Wait." The gentle Otherness about it, that ethereal beauty that is so close to you that you cannot always tell whether it is you or he/she. "Watch." You like these times best when it is a merging of the disctinctions between thee and thou. "Expectancy." The words are not necessary, at least now, and you put them down for a time, to be picked up tomorrow to lament or praise, to say "thank you" with, to place into juxtapositions on the paper, to be typed into a pay cheque.

But for now, now, the gentle ripple and really, now, this is all there is. Now is all there is.

There is nowhere to run ahead of things because there is nowhere but now. Not for you. Only for you Today. And you remember tonight what you sometimes forget, that you do not want to run ahead of things, not when you know the small experiences of delicious unfoldings, those little coincidences and promptings whispering approaches to take. You feel that a life lived loved by God begins taking on the quality of a story you are in, your own story, his/story, your story unpetaling. You do not want to make it grander than it is. You do not want to cast aside the lepers in yourself in favour of a Disney version. You do not want to cast aside anything and all you want to hold is what you can fit now, in your hands. Your hands open and flooding through your fingers, grains of sand.

Pic: obviouslysubtle

How Many Years?

susieq@gotalk.net.au (Sue) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 12:58:00 +0000

I sat out on someone's balcony in Upwey in the Dandenong Ranges this evening drinking a glass of wine and thinking, firstly, "I am so unbelievably lucky to be living in this country and looking at this view with a full stomach, a full fridge, a bed waiting for me."

It gets simpler as I go on.

I also thought, "How many years do I spend feeling like I have come home every time I come up here before I throw caution to the wind and give it a whirl for six months or a year?"

Guess I'll wait out the summer and see if there's anything left of the place left after the latest round of fires, and if there is, I s'pose I might just give that idea a bash.

In Defence of Batshit

susieq@gotalk.net.au (Sue) — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 23:09:00 +0000

"It's boring as batshit," I said about something recently. Not sure where that colloquialism first stemmed from but it was my ex who first said it. I took a mental note and tucked it away because there is nothing like nonsensical similes to delight my imagination (or is it metaphors? I always get them mixed up).

MikeF is a Franciscan through and through. Lover of the natural world, an ex-dairy herdsman, Mike has a love both for the strained gnat and the swallowed camel, for the bat and its shit.

And so here is Mike's defence of batshit:

I must speak up for batshit, however. Not boring. Not remotely boring. Full of the most fascinating bits of bugs - you can tell loads about the local ecosystem, not to mention the foraging habits of the bats themselves, from a good pile of batshit. (Of course you might have been referring to your great big Aussie fruit bats' shit - in which case it probably is pretty yawn-inducing.)

We lose so much of the world when we insist on boxing it all in, don't we? As soon as you box something you begin to lose your ability to see things in their isness. And I confess, now I contemplate the concept of shit, I realise not all shit is the same, and that perhaps lumping it all in together as boring really means you don't know shit about shit. After all, just because some shit - for example, that of a meat-eating human - is of the most hideous pungency, requiring quick flushing and the striking of an entire box of matches does not mean that it is boring, necessarily. I'm sure under a microscope it would be way less than boring. Might make you feel ill, but it would not be boring. And indeed, to state that the human meat-eater's shit is bad and evil by dent of its smell is to deny the amazing workings of the human body to get it there in your toilet (if you are one of the people who looks at their poo, but we've already gone over that haven't we, bloggers.)

And truly, all shit does not stink because look at horse shit. How good does horse shit smell? It's a shame my dog isn't a horse I must say (he would have to be of the miniature variety of course to still sleep on the bed), I would have preferred he was a horse on Saturday as I was reminded, when I trod barefoot in a dollop deposited on the concrete out the back, how dog shit is not like horse shit in the smell department.

And so this fine morning, I find my interest is piequed by what batshit looks like with bits of bugs in it. How does one go about finding some? Unfortunately, Google can't help because I cannot see any bugs in this batpoo collected from a cave and sold online for people's gardening pleasure. (I guess "screened" means taking all the bugs out of it - and really, looking at this picture, this really does look boring. So I guess I'll just have to take Mike's word for it :)

A Woman Scorned

susieq@gotalk.net.au (Sue) — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 09:17:00 +0000

Well I'm drunk on self pity,
scorned all that's been given me
I would drink from a bottle labelled Sure Defeat

Over the Rhine - Poughkeepsie

I don't go in much for self pity. Out of all the bad emotional habits, there are others I much more prefer, like underhanded self sabotage. The unstinting victim focus required for self pity becomes dull to me after about 15 minutes.

I can go for months without having any sorts of menstrual problems and then whack, down flows the black cloud and suddenly it's like a different world where all the colour's leached out and all the hope's done taken some trip on some downbound train spouting Bon Jovi lyrics.

It's just descended on me over the past few days this little black cloud and I feel like all my get up and go has got up and buggered right off. So hard it all feels, so hard. Such a struggle just to stand still. And I have a bloody headache.

Once I would try and fight through this and now I embrace myself, I walk into my house on Friday night and sigh and feel the house enfold me. I look to the Cirque de Soleil DVD I have to watch. It is surely time to go searching for some David Attenborough to top it off, to watch the wonder of the natural world and be soothed by it, somehow, even when the animals of the natural world have this awful propensity to keep eating each other. Time to immerse myself in some clay, to batten down the hatches and look after myself.

This morning it was too hard to swim myself up out of the mood. I do admit, when I walked up the ramp into the train station to go to work I probably exuded a bit of "Get out of my bloody way you bastards" sort of an air even though it was somewhat closer in mood to "Ahh, what's the point of all this again? Tell me, I doth forget." It is an unfortunate occurrence of human facial features that depression and arrogance often look the same out of one face and the time you most need someone to smile at you is the time they will most likely glare.

The young man and I, for all I can see from my single perspective, were most likely just as much to blame as each other really. In hindsight my bag was pretty overladen with stuff and obviously I bumped into him more than I realised at the time. But he was carrying a backpack slung over one shoulder and he bumped into me too. Oh, the single eyed focus of the self-righteous, more one-eyed than any Collingwood supporter.

Now, I've heard it said that when we recount incidences containing ourselves more than a few times we begin starring ourselves in a rather shinier role, and I am mindful of that. Perhaps I did bump into him more than he did into me. Perhaps if we were able to instant replay it could be found that my bumping was 23% more than his happened to be, and yet it is not how it felt to me.

"How about saying sorry you rude fucking bitch."

I had walked past him and was on my way to the ticket machine. I stopped when I heard this and turned around.

"Yeah, you," he sneered. "How about saying sorry for banging into me. Pretty fucking rude."

"Likewise," I retorted. Quick tempered young man, I saw the steam begin pummelling itself out of his ears. There were many people around us and they began staring at both of us. Time slowed down as it does in such confrontations, when it feels like everything is heightened and at the same time everything is muffled and I do not know how much I remember correctly.

I do remember, however his next words. He spat them out of his mouth.

"You fat fucking bitch," he said.

"You ugly prick," I said. It was pretty deadpan. Timing is everything in comedy you know. He wasn't really. Ugly, that is. He was quite an average, pleasant looking young bloke but you know, you take what your mind dishes up for you at the time. He started spluttering.

Whereas I should play poker. I have had so many years of teenage arguments with my father that I can stay stone cold and deadpan on the outside while inside I am seething, boiling, white hot, red hot. Of course it has a time limit on it. All that anger ends up seeping itself out and if I play my hand too long I give myself away, my voice quavering with the white and the red, my fingers shaking involuntarily. But right now it was coming out as ice, which INFURIATES young men with anger management problems.

The whole thing probably took 10 seconds. I walked towards the ticket machine and put my ticket in. See, there they were beginning already, the slightly shaking hands. The deep deep shame. You fat bitch. Obviously a few hundred more yoga sessions are in order.

The young bloke continued saying things I do not now remember.

"Why don't you fuck off and go and sit on someone's face, you fucking bitch," he said. Which sounded slightly less stupid when he said it than it does here but nevertheless still didn't make me think he was off to a Mensa meeting. He elaborated a little more on his strangely phrased thoughts, which contained the word "fuck" quite a bit.

"Perhaps an extended vocabulary might come in handy," I commented as the machine vomited my ticket back out at me and I stalked off onto the platform. He stormed off down the ramp out to the street. I could hear him for much longer than I could understand his words.

My hands fluttered over my page as the train came. I read the same paragraph over and over, all the way to Flagstaff. 'Do not cry,' I ordered myself crossly, like a child.

Can't let them see you cry. Don't let them see you cry. It feels to you as if your whole world would collapse and your soul would dissolve if anyone was to see you cry, if anyone was to know that the words of a stranger - you fat bitch - hurt you enough on the inside to make you cry. You read the same paragraph over and over, and you make it to work, and you tell a workmate what happened, and then you manage to get a bit of work done but it's the kind pity in another workmate's eyes who has heard why you are upset, and that is what does it, and you escape to the ladies room.

The ladies toilets, two toilets for about 50 women, that are always, always full so that you can never get a quiet poo in in peace, and now they are mercifully empty and the tears escape down your cheeks before you can hold the toilet paper up to your eyes.

You wonder where you have learnt this rule, the rule that says that no one must see you cry. You know where you have learnt it. It is a tight, tight, tight steel wad of pride that is lodged somewhere up under your chest cavity and no one, no one, is going to dislodge it except for Love.

Turn the other cheek, someone once said, but you didn't. Not today. Really, would it have been so much skin off your own nose to have stopped and said to the linguically challenged young man, "Sorry"? Really, now, girl, would it have? If you had, then you wouldn't have had to box him up into something mean and negative, would ya?

Naw, I don't be thinking it would have taken any skin off at all.

Sigh.

I Am the Toast of Life

susieq@gotalk.net.au (Sue) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 00:41:00 +0000

Why do people keep seeing Jesus in their pieces of toast? Why does it always have to be Jesus? Is he the only one allowed to appear on pieces of toast?

This so does not look like Jesus to me. It looks like Frank Zappa.

The Question of Sin

susieq@gotalk.net.au (Sue) — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 12:31:00 +0000

I received in my letterbox a small A5 folded photocopied pamphlet from my local Assembly of God the other day. On the outside it says: "Jesus Christ. He is Your Answer."

On the inside it proceeds to tell me that He is the answer to the problem of my sin. Here is part of how it details this problem:

The Problem - Everyone is in the Same Position - Separated From God

For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23)

The wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23).

God created us so that we can live with Him for ever, but because we inherit sin we are separated from God. We then accidentally or deliberately commit sins, and these form a cloud between us and God. We break God's laws and fall short of His standards ... we are sinners by nature, by practice and by choice.

God's Answer

What we couldn't do - God did, by sending His Son Jesus Christ to die on a cross for all mankind. He laid down His life to become the Bridge between God and us. "For it is by God's grace that you have been saved through faith. It is not the result of your own effort but God's gift so that no one can boast about it" (Ephesians 2:8-9).

On the back is a very helpful little indication of what you must do to get out of this quandary. You cannot do it yourself, but you must go the way God has provided, by repentance, turning to God so our sins may be wiped out, and by faith in Jesus Christ.

If I don't cross the bridge I am separated from God for ever - that is HELL. But if I change my direction and trust in Christ I will be with God forever - that is HEAVEN. Is there any good reason why you should not do this now?

How?

- Admit your need - "I am a sinner"
- With God's help turn from your sin
- Believe that Jesus Christ died on the cross to save you.

It then offers a little prayer that you can pray that "may help you to make a definite act of commitment to the Lord Jesus Christ."

Yawn. How boring as batshit is all of that? It all feels so commodified - everything. God the slot machine who needs the prayer of repentence. Even sin as a commodity. It would be interesting to see how I would react to this leaflet if I was not a believer. It all seems so deathly dull.

The way I came to belief was when I picked up a Bible one time while I was house-sitting for my parents. I was 22 years old, a seeker, always a seeker. I wanted to know what the truth was and I wanted to follow it. That desire has never left me. I read some of the book of Genesis while at my parents' place and, if memory serves me correctly, some of the book of Isaiah also (one of my favourite books of the bible). It was all weird and a bit freaky and cool in its poetry and there was a certain sort of indefinable something that captured my interest somehow.

Mum and Dad's next door neighbours were Christians and so I went in there one day that week and we talked. And I just had this ... feeling about this Jesus. There was a certain sort of a captivation there, an intrigue. Something in me was drawn to this ... presence, this essence, a strange tug. I remember Paul and Laurene asking me if I wanted to pray, and Laurene saying to Paul, "I think we'll have to do it for her. Look at her." And it was true. I felt gill green. I felt this horrible sort of evil descending around me. I don't know if it felt like something outside of me or inside of me or both. I had had some experience with the occult in the past. I had conducted seances in my bedroom where the temperature had unexplainedly dropped to freezing and the smell of a million disgusting farts filled the air and so I guess it didn't seem all that unfeasible to me that there could be some sort of personification of evil out there. I was, after all, leaning toward some man who had lived 2000 years ago who apparently rose from the dead, so I guess throwing some dastardly demons in there as well was just going the whole hog.

I do not remember what I was feeling or thinking except sort of nauseous, and sort of creeped, and sort of like I wanted to get the hell out of there and go and screw my brains out with a stranger and suck on a bong 17 or 93 times in a row to get away from that horrible feeling.

And so Paul and Laurene prayed for me. And then a few days later I was talking to my friend Debbie on the phone and saying, "Hey, how weird is this. I've been reading the Bible." And we laughed at how moronic I was and then Deb mentioned that a requirement for getting her young daughter baptised at the local church was a Christianity Explained course and did I want to come along?

And so I did, and I remember us most likely giving poor old Lynette, the minister's wife, grief because you know me, always liking to shock. But she loved us. And I remember coming across diagrams such as the one contained in the leaflet in front of me which show our separation from God with the cross being the bridge between us and a holy God and blah blah blah and I say blah blah blah not because I don't think it's the most amazing thing ever that God has breached the gap in the way that I still 17 years later believe that he has, but because I think we got it round the wrong way.

This leaflet seems to preach to me that the cross is something that is required for God. But God does not require anything to love us. S/he does because that is what God does. The separation is on our side, like the guilt, and the distortion, and the shame. All on our side. God did not need to wipe our sin away because it was something that got in his way but because it gets in ours. It distorts absolutely everything. It ruins and smears and besmirches and deadens and numbs and we choose death instead of life and we believe good is bad and bad is good and on and on and you know the score cos you live it every day. And knowing that in some weird cosmic way all of that just doesn't matter on some level, doesn't even exist because this is part of what Christ accomplished ... well, those fields you can play in and stuff sparkles in there and you get a bit childlike and relaxed and then we're sort of starting to get somewhere.

I think even back then at the very beginning I had glimpses of the grace. It permeates. I had glimpses of this presence, of this God. I felt it in awful sinful places like at the bottom of a bong. I felt it in the laughs with my friends and family, in the connection that lies between everything, the threads of which even back as a 22 year old and earlier I would pick up on for a glimmer of a second and it would fill me with joy. And so even then I think I got an idea that there was something slightly wrong somewhere even though I could not explain it or articulate it (and still find it difficult sometimes). These pissy little outpourings of empire religion somehow are able to make sows ears out of silk persons, make running to God smell about as palatable as freshly brewed dog poo, as exciting as doing your tax return - little formulas to be worked, the paradigm of which geared everyone up to go careening into the AOG performing their egoes off because even though Jesus the good guy has come along and done what he's done, it's hard to forget about God the bad guy, the oh so holy one who is so perturbed by our sin that he can't bear to look upon it in his pissy little God psyche ... even though Jesus Christ had taken it all away, even the sins of the whole world.

And God has been breathing his life into me and us in all that time and never once have I felt like he has given up on me, not even after all those sins I was committing and going to church stoned one night so I felt ashamed afterwards, and marrying someone who did not believe because I thought it wouldn't matter and that God was holding out on me when he said, "Not this way. Don't go this way" because I had learned to hold out on myself and so I thought he would do the same.

Like a thread of goo runs throughout the whole human psyche the concept that God is holding out on us and he is a mean-spirited bastard and all the other things you and I think that have been a part of the deconstruction that has been going on in this Body in the past 20 years with everything being shaken that could be shaken and our conceptions redefined on what justice and love and worship and being the church and everything else looks like. It is quite amazing that we look through lenses that are sort of warped somehow, unintentionally. He is just so different to us. We need to be taught all over again everything, really. And we suffer and we see in the dark and it is true that the times that I cry out the most and cry for the feel of his hand on my shoulder and he doesn't answer make me dislike him - and I don't know the answers to why that happens but it does not make me think he has got up and walked away and left me when those things do happen.

It amazes me how all the way through, down in my soul, harboured there the way Mary did all those things in her heart, the feeling that somehow things as I was seeing them and as I was being told were all skew whiff and somehow I was safe and somehow I could trust what my heart was saying about God being bigger than the story that was being told me, that this whole story was a thing of great and amazing beauty that I would one day feel proud to proclaim from the rooftops even though then I wouldn't go out and witness even if a gun was held to my head because I was ashamed of that gospel. And I still am.

Because the good news isn't that a holy God has deigned to thrust his son into the firing line while he sits far away. The good news is that that is a bullshit construct out of human minds, and the good news is sin shall not be the last word, and the good news is that he loves me and the kingdom of heaven is near.

Handmade Fences and Beautiful Gates

susieq@gotalk.net.au (Sue) — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 22:42:00 +0000

I have begun reading one of the secondhand books that arrived from BetterWorld Books the other day. It is called The Journey From the Center to the Page by Jeff Davis. It is all about combining yoga practice and writing practice and so far it is proving a timely, lovely and thought-provoking read.

It always amuses and ponders me the amount of rituals creative people surround themselves with to define their practice and give them the courage to walk into the dark. Some of those things are cliched, like a bottle of bourbon, for example. On Sunday, before my writing time I stood in mountain pose, with my hands folded at my chest, felt my feet grounded into the floor and asked myself a simple question: "Why am I writing?" I waited for the answer to bubble up, and it did eventually. At least that day it was simply "To express myself." Last night it was "Because it joys me" and I felt the bubbles of yellow flowing up from my solar plexus at that sort of champagne definition.

Asking this question of myself seems to somehow bring me down into my body so I can write from that space instead of being all stuck up in my disembodied head with the 14 million mind monkeys. It feels most delicious.

The second part of my beginning ritual, after asking this first question, is to ask myself what am I writing for in this particular instance? Both times it has been to further my short story and in fact last night I finished it. I don't know how good it is - some parts are good, and now comes the revision, but I've finished it. I've actually finished a short story. I've been so blocked for so long, and now writing just feels hard with a natural tendency to want to procrastinate about it - but it feels able to be done. Somehow, it doesn't feel anymore like the invisible gates or doors that were keeping me out are ... well, keeping me out any more, or maybe even there any more.

I have performed that little ritual above twice now at the beginning of each writing time. In the book I mentioned above, the writer talks about how we can build "handmade fences with beautiful gates" for our thoughts. Is that just not a delightful sort of a way to put it? The simple ritual of lighting a candle at the beginning of my writing time and blowing it out at the end helped to build a fence around that time and make it something special.

Hooray for me, I've finished my story :) *back pat*

Woman and Unreachable Standards: Airbrushing as Business Imperative

susieq@gotalk.net.au (Sue) — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 04:08:00 +0000

Pic: Sarah Murdoch on the latest Womens Weekly cover.

The Australian Women's Weekly has run its latest issue with a non-airbrushed cover shot of Sarah Murdoch, model and daughter-in-law of His Antichristness, Rupert (how on earth did such a man come out of a dudey gal like Iris, but I digress).

Hooray for some sense and guts to come from someone appearing on a magazine cover. Sarah asked for her shot to not be airbrushed. As she said in this interview from the ABC site:

I think when I'm retouched in photographs it's worse, because when people see me in real life they go, 'Oh God, isn't she old?' ... It makes me mad that we can't embrace the beauty of ageing, because we're all going to do it.

Yeah. Like, duh. Good stuff, Sarah. Awesomeness.

The Weekly's editor, Helen McCabe, when asked if they will do it again said:

There are real business imperatives why magazines have gone this way. It's a very competitive industry and I'm - at this stage - just taking a little baby step and seeing how this goes for now.

I am planning on buying a copy of the Weekly. I'm hoping it becomes a business imperative to NOT airbrush women. It's disgusting and pretty much immoral, and also dehumanising for women to constantly have portrayed at them unattainable beauty that doesn't even exist.

Nothing is done if profit cannot be achieved in the small, small business world we now live in. But oh, how cool if this was to become a standard.

Body Praying

susieq@gotalk.net.au (Sue) — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 00:22:00 +0000

I have so much more energy these days, now they are lengthening. I am sorry that the consequence of them lengthening for me is that Erin is most likely suffering from the shortening of them at her end. I cannot think of a remedy for this situation, living on a sphere and all that. If we lived on a flat plane, then we could all have the same amount of sun all the time, but it would probably mess with the time-space continuum and stuff wouldn't grow and who knows what else :)

Anyway, if I was going to create a place for people to live, far cooler a round ball that just hangs in the middle of nowhere being held up by nothing, with distinct seasons to give variety. Maybe the flat plane thing would be boring. Or maybe there's one of those in an alternate universe.

My floors are almost vacuumed, due to this excess energy. I've got some yummy meals to cook. There's clothes flapping on the line. I've driven to Vermont and back and then to Seaford and back in 24 hours. I've delighted in catching up with friends. All this yoga I have been doing has been a total Godsend. How delightful it is to get back into this space where if I do not do an hour's worth of asanas one day, I am hanging out for it the next. I can feel the greater flexibility in my body already, plus I am beginning to tone up, and the sense of wellbeing is pretty much priceless.

I am in love with my spine. It doesn't get paid all that much attention in our society but it really is the centre of the ship, something that I focus on every day now. The main seven chakras, each of which is linked to a gland, run along the spine. So does the central nervous system. Working my spine keeps me centred, helps keep the anxiety at bay, the mind monkeys from chattering me into a coma.

It's amazing how spot on people thousands and thousands of years ago were about intricate parts of the body - glands and things. It was knowledge arrived at in a different way to the way we often measure our knowledge these days. What amazes me is the great poetry and narrative that accompanied earlier ways of knowing - and how accurate it was. Mindboggling really. And exciting too. We "know" in many different ways. Our bodies "know" things before our conscious minds do. We do well to listen to them instead of dismissing them as something evil.

It also amazes me, the whole chakra thing, how it works. We dismiss them as stupid moronity because you will not find a chakra on a micrscope. And yet science is consistently finding that we are energetic bodies. Chakras live in our energetic bodies, not our physical bodies. That makes them no less real than what we sense as that part of us that goes on, that is our essence. People dismiss this stuff because our ways of viewing things are too narrow and restrictive. Sola scriptura ways of viewing anything dismisses what does not fit into small compartments of our own making. As if any of us ever know anything perfectly.

I cannot begin to describe how wonderful it feels to do different poses that stretch the spine and flood my body with good feeling. I feel like everything is working better in my body since I began a regular yoga practice. Performing yoga asanas is like an active, beautiful form of prayer to me, now.

Fearfully and wonderfully made and all that. We are beautifully made too. The intricate complexity of our bodies, of all of these different bits that all come from a single cell. God, you take my breath away. (And you give it, too :)

Grace

susieq@gotalk.net.au (Sue) — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 22:04:00 +0000

Although we must continue to speak on behalf of those who are oppressed and warn oppressors, my willingness to forgive them is not dependent on how they respond. Being able to extend grace and to forgive people sets us free. We no longer need to spend precious emotional energy thinking about the day oppressors will get what they deserve.

What I am learning about grace lifts a weight from my shoulders, which is nothing short of invigorating. When we can forgive and accept those who refuse to listen to God’s command to do justice, it allows them to hear God’s judgment without feeling a personal judgment from us. Which, in the end gives our message more integrity. The ability to give grace while preaching justice makes our witness even more effective.

Spencer Perkins

Great article about grace to be had here.

Grace is one of the reasons why the concept of an eternal hell where you are punished for your unrepented sins sounds more like a concept arising out of the ego of a man who doesn't really understand what grace is than out of a God who calls himself Love. Punishment for the sake of getting rid of your own anger and fear seems such a human device. God seems so much more creative than that.

The whole wanting to see people get what they deserve thing is one of the biggest prisons there is. It speaks just as much about the person mouthing the words as it does about the person who has committed the crime. I do not understand how some people are so dead-set on vengeance as they think it is anything other than a dead-end for them personally. It does not change anything at all within your own soul to see someone be punished, even if that crime was perpetrated towards you. It will not make you feel safer. Nothing makes you feel safe except knowing, really knowing, that we are capable of anything that those we hate and demonise are. And if we don't know that then we don't know how far down we stretch beyond our conscious knowing, both for good and ill.

"Vengeance is mine, I will repay" says God somewhere and for a long time I used to see that as a threat by a somehow deficient God and now I see it as a sigh of relief.

On our train system there are different sorts of artworks stuck up on the walls. "Moving Melbourne Through Art" they say. I think it's a good thing. Yesterday I saw a poem which contained a line about, "First enlightenment, and then go do the dishes." I laughed when I saw it again in the post above: "“Caring for each other, forgiving each other, and keeping the dishes washed."

I do not think enlightenment always produces amazingly lofty results. Surely the most amazing but seemingly most mundane is the way our eyes are opened to how truly amazing a single person is, how low, how deep, how fucked up, how dreamy and beautiful. The most basic and life-altering result of enlightenment is taking seriously how deep the changes go when we care for each other without insisting our personal agendas be consented to. Liberating.

Bruno's

susieq@gotalk.net.au (Sue) — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 22:00:00 +0000

I wish I'd been to Bruno's Sculpture Garden before the fires that almost wiped it out. I would have loved to have seen these pieces amongst the beauty of his rainforest garden. And yet, even with a depleted garden the pieces had lost none of their charm and whimsy. Apologies for not-the-best shots - my camera was behaving badly along with my unsteady hands.

Marysville

susieq@gotalk.net.au (Sue) — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 10:51:00 +0000

The main street of Marysville. Remember all those beautiful overhanging trees that used to run all the way down the street? Forty people died in the fires that ripped through the town back in February.
There is something so sad and so hopeful about this pic. No more the gorgeous little weatherboard shop that was a must-visit on the handful of occasions I found myself in Marysville. The lollies sampled (Spuds, sweet coconut balls) tasted scrumptous. Of the few shops that have survived, over the other side of the road and a few doors up are the bakery and a cafe. They were doing a roaring trade on the weekend.

The hills surrounding Marysville look really strange. The trees are still there but they look naked, and the tops of them stand up like needles against the sky. But still, everywhere you look, green fuzzy growth fronding their way out of blackened trunks. The effect when we first drove out of Healesville was ... well, it was stunning, to be honest, with stand upon stand of black trunks all together. Such a dramatic sort of a look, a stark beauty. The rains have brought green grass growth everywhere and the eye is drawn to it hungrily.

There were several of these gates without blocks. This is pretty much all that is left of what was once a swank conference centre (except for the empty swimming pool).

Bruno's

Mandala

susieq@gotalk.net.au (Sue) — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 10:47:00 +0000

Octopus's Garden

Tired Mr Spots

susieq@gotalk.net.au (Sue) — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 21:58:00 +0000

Mr Naughty is very tired after his busy weekend. He only just got out of bed now.

I will write a bit about Marysville when I get the chance. Quite surreal; didn't feel like it was the same place. I was worried the earth would be drenched in sorrow, like everyone's grief would have been impaled to the ground and we would have had to have climbed over it, but it wasn't like that, at least not on a Sunday and Monday in early Spring when most of the people around seemed to be tourists.

There is fuzzy new leaf growth running up the seared, blackened trunks of mountain ash everywhere, and the tree ferns have rebounded amazingly well, as they do. The recent rains are running the stream fast behind Bruno's place and have greened up the grass all over. The insistence of life to continue on after death.

I understand the "for sale" signs. Some things are too hard to overcome and life must be begun somewhere else. I also understand the caravans here and there on cleared sites ready to begin again.

"We met over the internet ..."

susieq@gotalk.net.au (Sue) — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 22:04:00 +0000

At the Gatehouse fundraiser on Friday night there were several people on Louisa's table who asked me how we knew each other.

The words "We met on the internet" still carry funny undertones, somehow. You feel like you want to add, "But it was all perfectly harmless really. We met via a mutual blog friend who introduced us and hey, isn't the internet amazing for meeting people!"

And you exclaim at the end because you're trying to make up for the fact that when you say "we met on the internet" the idea that floats up is of meeting sordidly via a group sex with donkeys chat room or something.

I wonder when that stigma will pass :)

Off to Marysville. Toodle pip.

Rich Grateful Trepidatious

susieq@gotalk.net.au (Sue) — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 03:25:00 +0000

You can tell you've been on Facebook a bit too much when you go to type as the first sentence of your blog post: "is amazed at how quickly the day flies."

So I'll start again.

I'm amazed at how quickly the day flies. It is almost 2.30 pm. After a bit of a sleep-in, followed by my customary morning pages, an interwebs chat, a scan of the interwebs, then some meditation followed by a yoga session, I feel awesome ... and am wondering what happened to the morning! By the time I get done with those luxurious-necessary things to start my day my day is almost ... well, finished.

Which is why I too often stay up till 1am :)

I am feeling rich and grateful and a bit trepidatious today. I am feeling rich because there are two books waiting for me at the library on reserve ~ Breath by Tim Winton, The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. Bliss, peoples. Just bliss.

I am feeling trepidatious because tomorrow I'm going to Marysville, which was one of the villages almost totally destroyed in the fires back in February. I am going to Bruno's Sculpture Garden. The people who have rallied behind this man to help rebuild his sculptures - he must be the type of man who has given much to the people in the first place. He is staying in Marysville to rebuild. He did lose his house and his art gallery, but 60% of his sculptures have survived. Maggie was telling me that a group of people who love him helped comb through the debris like archeologists finding clay fingers and such things to help rebuild some of the pieces. Most survived the heat of the fires (having already surived the heat of the kiln) but were busted apart by falling branches. I am going to be like a Japanese tourist tomorrow, sucking up inspiration into my camera.

I am feeling excited on behalf of my dog because if he was doing anything other than doggishly living in the moment, and if he understood English, he would have heard me yesterday that there is a little mini road trip on the cards for the puppy dog. I am staying up in Marysvlle tomorrow night with my mum - I always make sure I stay in dog-friendly cabins in dog-friendly caravan parks :)

I am feeling grateful that I am coming out of hibernation and back into circulation. I went to the fundraiser for the St Kilda Gatehouse last night. The Gatehouse has been providing support to street workers for the past 17 years; Louisa has been superlatively working there as a support worker for the past 6 months. I am looking forward to going down there and meeting the women and volunteering some of my time. We all need each other so much. This world is too beautiful and too awful to do it alone. People need people.

(What they do not need, Radio Susie, is segues into Barbra Streisand numbers. You just keep yourself out of it, thanks very much).

As a bonus, last night I saw the maestro singing storyteller Mr Paul Kelly sing a couple of songs. No surprises he opened with From St Kilda to Kings Cross, with updated references to reconstructed beaches. And he finished with one of my favourite songs of all, How to Make Gravy. Loveliness. Gratefulness for sharing of gifts.

Hey, happy Saturday, bloggers!

(ΠΣ¨ Ι ςαντεδ το τυπε μορε ον τηισ ποστ βθτ σομεηος Ι ηαωε πρεσσεδ τηε ψομβινατιον οφ βθττονσ τηατ ηαωε τθρνεδ μυ Ενγλιση ιντο Γρεεκ. Πρεττυ φθψκινγ αννουινγ, ρεαλλυ!!!!)

Translation: ("PS: I wanted to add more on this post but unfortunately I have pressed some buttons so that I am typing in Greek. Pretty fucking annoying." Or words to that effect. Luckily it's taken me a bit quicker to work out how to change it back than the last time I accidentally pressed Alt Shift :)

K

susieq@gotalk.net.au (Sue) — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 22:23:00 +0000

I saw K last night. Feeling rather despondent, as you do with broken or cracked ribs. They came about because some woman with a smack problem who had just lost custody of her kids chose to take it out on the homeless woman outside the court.

Scapegoating in action. Please pray for my friend K.

Whine

susieq@gotalk.net.au (Sue) — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:19:00 +0000

I am feeling whiney today. Must be the clouds. I am tired and dismayed at how difficult it is to get to a place where I feel safe creatively and then how easy it is to fall off that space. Which is weird because when I'm there it's like a grounded giant field and it doesn't ever feel like I could fall off. But then, that's the weird nature of being in God, is it not? Whenever I am in communion with him/her I never feel I could step even a centimetre away. An hour later, my thoughts have me situated in a weedy piece of industrial wasteland next door to a nuclear power plant somewhere far away than where I was before.

And yet Winston Churchill's speech to university students remains one of my favourites: He got up, students expectant, and speeched in its entirety: "Never give up. Never give up. Never, ever, ever, ever give up." And then sat back down.

Sometimes it pays to just cut the bullshit and call stuff for what it is. All of these flights and flutters and removals and blocks are ALL fear.

Until I get back to feeling safer I do not write my story. I cannot continue to write a first draft until I am feeling free. (I am getting there; it is a powerful place; it draws me on, despite being faithless that anything I am doing will get me back there. And yet everything I am doing is also powerful even though it feels weak and stupid and pissy).

And so I come in to my story through the back door. Started painting a mandala last night which was nice. Tonight I hope to stick back all of the snapped off bits of hair from the clay bust that I removed in a fit of pique the other day.

(Pique. Now, there's a word that does not really sound the way it feels. Pique sounds too fluffy, as if there is custard in there somewhere and when I experience pique, it's all spiky and made out of tetanus-inducing bits of scrap metal.)

I snapped off the bits of hair because a couple of bits came off accidentally, and rather than glue them back on (the piece is leather hard and I don't think I'm going to get it fired) I snapped all of them off in some sort of self-sabotage. But it didn't work because now some of the pieces snapped off too high, revealing the fact that instead of fashioning ears for my piece I just made lumps because hair was to cover them.

I really have this expectation somewhere in my mind that things should always go smoothly and when they don't it's because I'm failing. When really, it's just because things never really do go smoothly in the perfectionistic sort of way that I expect them too. It's called life.

Ahhhh, expectancy. Please come back and smother my expectations.

Laying on of Hands

susieq@gotalk.net.au (Sue) — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 11:14:00 +0000

What does the term "laying on of hands" mean to you (if anything - good or bad connotations)?

Have you ever experienced something like this? What happened?

(Methinks it's all a bit too wild and mystical for the overly intellectual Western Church to know what do with :)

Ms Do/Be

susieq@gotalk.net.au (Sue) — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 01:41:00 +0000

Ahhh, perhaps I just think too much. But when I consider rejoining Christian circles again, so many things come up on the inside, you know? They flare up and they scare me. I guess what it comes down to, the crux, is the do/be distinction. And I do want to be a good DoBee, buzz buzz. Just not all day long.

But it's the do/be distinction that scares me, and because of my own issews and past history and weird shyness/extroversion thang, and a desire to be pleasing to people and not piss them off, and how the past 10 years have panned out for me, I don't have a shiny spiritual CV to take in with me, held out before me like an offering. Can I join your gang, without a shiny spiritual CV? Actually, that wouldn't be the gang I would be joining anyway. I don't even want one of those sorts of CVs; I've at least worked that out.

I guess if there was any club CV I would want to possess, I imagine it would be the grungy emergent sort of CV. But - no. I don't belong there either. I don't like labels. I don't like to call myself an emergent, although perhaps this is the closest tribe that I could sidle up to. Apparently it is an emergent thing to not like labels. That therefore could be taken to mean that I'm emergent simply because I might sort of look like one and I discount the label, but that's something I could maybe dismantle quite easily just from the completion of a couple of first year philosophy 101 classes. And yet, I digress :)

So I don't have a grungy gritty spiritual CV, at least not one that is externally observable. I don't have anything. I don't have a "ministry" and I hate that word. I despise that whole boxing up of gifts that ebb and flow tidally into a commodity. All I do is I pray, I intercede; sometimes I let my heart go out to people who might need it for a hug. I want to 'be' more than I want to 'do' and I want to 'be with' more than I want to 'do to'. Of course, that feels like I am right in the centre of everything when I see that this is what drives me. And yet, so often fear rises up that I am wasting my life. And how often it rises up living in a culture that is all about 'doing' and externalities and shudderingly finds itself with contents who have no idea about how to 'be'.

And I guess this is what scares me. From living within that culture, I am desiring to enter back into a sub-culture which, last time I looked, was pretty much about 'do', as far as I could glean anyway with the super sensitive radar I got to hone as a kid. And though the desire is for me to do, and to do within a group of people who are also doing, the real scary question is, do I get to 'be' first?

I think I really don't believe that I will ever find anywhere spiritual that feels like home. This belief does not mean it's true, of course. It's just that, the tag 'Christians' carries so much baggage with it, and every little bit of shame that still resides in me (still, dammit, STILL!!!!) springs to attention like something on Viagra when I consider a return to a people who, when I am being really honest, I don't trust. Not even if they're not shiny.

And yet, maybe that's a good place to be, at least in the admission. After all, you can still be friends with someone you don't trust in certain areas. Maybe it's sort of along the same sort of line, the way Nate and Erin were surmising in the comments on her latest post, that you can love the church without liking the church. With boundaries, of course.

Aggggggh. A crack of thunder just sounded overhead while I tidied up the ends of this post. Brings me back to the centre again, to an untamed God who is rather ... well, big, I guess. Big enough to keep working this stuff out in me, I guess. Big enough, thank God, than my fluttering, worrying mind.

Ponderings of a Bubbly Melancholy Solitudinal Extrovert

susieq@gotalk.net.au (Sue) — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 01:06:00 +0000

Okay, so it so feels like a new sort of chapter in my life. Of course it's Spring, and it feels like that every Spring to me, after coming out of Winter and its doldrums. But this time I feel like something even bigger has ended somehow, something that has gone on for 10 years, all this deconstruction and wilderness walking in solitary places. I feel, really feel, like I want to get out amongst it a bit and be involved and so I'm taking steps towards that and going where I'm drawn and hopefully where I feel like God is whispering.

One of the things that is scary about that (on a list of about 1400) is the whole busyness thing, the feeling that for you to be committed to something means ignoring your own needs, you know? I am, after all, requiring decent doses of solitude - not like before, but still, a decent dollop. It's just that now my grief isn't seeping out my sides I feel like I can start being amongst other people and be myself again. How good that feels. New Spring growth.

Someone at work said to me yesterday, "You're such a bubbly personality. I see you bouncing around the place and it just exudes from you." Which was a lovely thing to hear. But I feel like I sweep such a big range, you know? I told her that I also am inclined to melancholy and she was surprised. Hell, I'm surprised. How do you be a bubbly melancholy solitudinal extrovert? It doesn't make sense.

But I am. I guess I am just hoping that knowing myself and my boundaries and all these other things I have learnt out in this space (I love the desert, I cannot ever leave it fully) will hold me in stead when I am in amongst the mix. Because peer group pressure never really goes away, does it?

Happy Saturday bloggers. It is a beautiful one out there. I have just been to the chiropractor and walked for 40 minutes first thing in my morning and I feel wonderful. Happy weekend to you.

Christian Meditation

susieq@gotalk.net.au (Sue) — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 11:38:00 +0000

As an interesting aside: anti-mystical Christians who attack meditation often do so because of a groundless metaphysical argument: that if we “clear our mind” we are leaving ourselves open to demonic attack. This is ridiculous for two reasons: first, it is as impossible to clear one’s mind as it is to consciously stop one’s heart from beating: the point behind meditation is to relax and slow down the mind, so that we can become conscious of the luminous space between our thoughts. And secondly, as Evagrius makes it clear: if a demon is going to attack us, he’ll attack us through our thoughts, not through the silence between them. With that in mind, meditation, far from being a vulnerable practice, actually is a powerful tool that any spiritual warrior would want to use; for it enables us to calmly observe our thoughts, learn to practice non-attachment in relation to our thoughts, and — again, as Evagrius points out — empowers us to gently turn our thoughts over to Christ, for the purpose of discerning which thoughts are truly worthy to act on. Indeed, if more of us could learn to submit all our thoughts to the light of love, wouldn’t the world be a better place?

Carl McColman, The Website of Unknowning

Succinct, McColman dude.

Funny how you start seeing a fourth century monk in one place, and suddenly up he pops all over the joint. Good to hear you speak more, Evagrius. You have much to say to us 1700 years down the line.

The luminous space between our thoughts.

May they grow ever bigger for all of us. I find there is sometimes so little space between my thoughts that they can spiral me down into a teary funk in the blink of an hour. This is why I need meditation and prayer. To remember me to the luminous space between my thoughts. Made out of clouds, or fabric softener, or kittehs, or something :) Made of God, who beats my heart.