Posts
I feed my hungry insecurities with your talents and you feed yours with mine.
No one ever wins.
These words cut so clean, so true. One of the most beautiful souls I've never met wrote them. Her name is Esta. I stumbled upon her blog two days ago and have been reading it voraciously during the cracks in my days. The whole post I tore them from is here. Her writing is crystalline, piercing, honest.
Some rare days as I'm reading, it's as though just a few words illumine the space I'm living in like lightning through a bedroom window when I was six years old and it was two o'clock in the morning. This was one of those days.
My mind has been cluttered with a whole lot of things lately, each one deadly important but not receiving the time it needs to be thought through. I've been struggling with contentment, I've been struck dumb (or at least should have been--sometimes the tongue speaks when silence would be more wise) with the reality of my own smallness, my own helplessness in the face of bone-deep realities like anesthetized children growing up in anesthetized homes in an anesthetized society. I've found myself yearning for some sort of heroism, for the life spent in pouring out that somehow seems so much more exotic on an Indian reservation in the Canadian bush or in an orphanage in a third world country than it does spent in a second floor apartment in Small Town, USA recycling the old schedule of work, grad school, sleep and church week after week. I've been wrestling with my old friend Ordinary.
But then there is the question of motive.
Of escapism.
Of why I somehow think contentment would be more easily grasped There instead of Here, if loneliness would somehow dissipate if things were different.
No, loneliness is a steady companion, the type that has a knack for walking in step with you.
I've found that loneliness is of two strains: the type that binds you tight, constricts, cuts you off, blinds you to all but self, or the type that opens you up to the most weak and wounded parts of who you are so that you can numbly hold them up to the God Who already knows, already loves, already calls you child.
And as for contentment, I know the truth. The truth is that there is no contentment in the exotic for its own sake. There is no contentment in heroism if it is so self-aware that it names itself such. There is no soul more worth reaching out to than the one that walks across my path this moment, this hour, this day. These souls that thread their way like quicksilver through my life--just these--are the ones most worth knowing.
Some rare days as I'm reading, it's as though just a few words illumine the space I'm living in like lightning through a bedroom window when I was six years old and it was two o'clock in the morning. This was one of those days.
My mind has been cluttered with a whole lot of things lately, each one deadly important but not receiving the time it needs to be thought through. I've been struggling with contentment, I've been struck dumb (or at least should have been--sometimes the tongue speaks when silence would be more wise) with the reality of my own smallness, my own helplessness in the face of bone-deep realities like anesthetized children growing up in anesthetized homes in an anesthetized society. I've found myself yearning for some sort of heroism, for the life spent in pouring out that somehow seems so much more exotic on an Indian reservation in the Canadian bush or in an orphanage in a third world country than it does spent in a second floor apartment in Small Town, USA recycling the old schedule of work, grad school, sleep and church week after week. I've been wrestling with my old friend Ordinary.
But then there is the question of motive.
Of escapism.
Of why I somehow think contentment would be more easily grasped There instead of Here, if loneliness would somehow dissipate if things were different.
No, loneliness is a steady companion, the type that has a knack for walking in step with you.
I've found that loneliness is of two strains: the type that binds you tight, constricts, cuts you off, blinds you to all but self, or the type that opens you up to the most weak and wounded parts of who you are so that you can numbly hold them up to the God Who already knows, already loves, already calls you child.
And as for contentment, I know the truth. The truth is that there is no contentment in the exotic for its own sake. There is no contentment in heroism if it is so self-aware that it names itself such. There is no soul more worth reaching out to than the one that walks across my path this moment, this hour, this day. These souls that thread their way like quicksilver through my life--just these--are the ones most worth knowing.
Ah, you found Esta's blog! I found it a number of years ago, and devoured it as well. She speaks truth that cuts to the heart. Looking back, I sort of wonder how I stumbled upon it. God uses the internet in strange ways.
ReplyDeleteThat's so. She's a soul I think I'd really like to know in person. If reading her words online is all I can have, though, I'll take it.
DeleteWow. Indeed.
ReplyDeleteThis is a good post, and thanks for the link to her blog. I'll probably spend a bit too much time there today.
Did you end up reading her blog at all? She seems like such a Real person, with the kind of realness that is beautiful and a bit overwhelming. [And it doesn't hurt that her writing is so much like poetry even when it's prose.]
Delete