What is Faith in Ambiguity?

Faith: belief in anything, as a code of ethics, standards of merit,etc.

Ambiguity: doubtfulness or uncertainty of meaning or intention

Photo by Mike Adams

"What do you blog about?"

Again and again, at my first writer's conference, I was asked what my blog was about and what kind of writing I do. I tried answering this question multiple different ways.

"Oh, I write some funny stuff and some think-y stuff."

"I write about ducks."

"I write about my kids. My kids all have ADHD. I guess it's a blog about ADHD."

The most surprising thing to me was that when people heard "Faith in Ambiguity," they usually asked me if the blog was about my faith.

"No," I would say. "It's about my faith in ambiguity."

Obviously, this wasn't clear, even to me. I learned many things at the Erma Bombeck Writer's Workshop, some of them tactical, some of them inspirational, that will make me a better writer and a better blogger. None were more important than this:

I am funny, but I am not a humorist. I am a writer who writes about an idea. That idea is faith in ambiguity.

What is faith in ambiguity? Faith in ambiguity is about asking questions, questioning assumptions and taking a second look. It is about carefully listening to both sides of an argument and then throwing both of them out the window to look for the truth that neither side has found, in the dirty, dark place everyone forgot to look. Faith in ambiguity is about making the joke that gets the laugh of recognition but that no one was brave enough to tell.  Faith in ambiguity is about owning every part of being human, every part of being alive–the illness, the pain, the addiction, the embarrassment, the fear, as well as the love and inspiration. It is about showing up, fully human, not knowing the answer to anything, and saying so, and then laughing until you wet your pants because it is all so ridiculously hilarious.

Why, you might ask, would all this uncertainty be good? People find great comfort in answers and the faith they hold that there is a reason and order underlying everything. Ambiguity–faith in ambiguity–seems to fly in the face of that comfort. And I really think that it does. People who want their bee hives to remain unprodded will probably not like this blog as much as people who are strangely fascinated by a sudden exodus of bees. That is OK with me. I stopped being comfortable years ago with the answers that were served to me like bland porridge, and started seeking my own. But, apart from personal temperament, I think there are some excellent reasons for having a little more faith in ambiguity, all around.

Not knowing means we can experiment. If we are already sure that the earth is flat and traveling to the end will cause a person to fall off into an abyss, there is no reason to circumnavigate the globe. It takes a doubter to come up with that. All explorers are, by nature, doubtful people–the ones who want to see evidence with their own two eyes–our kindred souls rejecting their breakfast pablum in search of more savory fare that may conceivably exist, if only they look far enough.

Science is a function of uncertainty. Whether or not you think you like science, my strong guess is that you enjoy electricity, access to emergency health care and Starbucks WiFi, all of which are the products of somebody at some point supposing that a) this is not really all there is and b) it could actually be better. People who push the boundaries of the world forward, causing creation to unroll in a direction heretofore unimaginable, are not contented souls. They have itchy minds, full of wonders and doubts and problems to solve. I write because my mind itches something awful and the only way I know to scratch it is to inflict the questions I have on the rest of the world.

When we don't know, we can ask. Asking is a profoundly powerful act–one that binds communities together in humble service and mutual respect of one another. In a family, in a church congregation, in a classroom, in an office, if you want to empower the people you find yourself traveling along with, ask them. Ask them for advice. Ask them how to work the TV. Ask them what they really want from their community. Then listen. We cannot ask if the answers sit on our tongue, melting like lozenges that make everything taste like oranges. Our mouths have to be clean. I have learned to ask children for help and to tell them I am not sure and, because of this, they see that they can become a person of importance with me. They are dying to be asked for their assistance, and I find adults to be no different.

When we don't know, when we are not sure, we can have compassion. I may think you were rude to me just now, but what if really you are in terrible pain? What if I misunderstood? What if your intentions, all along, have been aimed toward helping me and I could see you as nothing but a bully? Ambiguity makes me pause. The data is not clear. Is that child behaving this way in class because their parents are bad parents or because the delivery of my curriculum is not working for them? Is it ADHD or boredom? A terrible attitude or perhaps a crippled sense of self? If I am not sure, I look again. And again. Doing so makes me a better teacher, mother and friend.

The long arc of justice is and always has been a function of the shedding of our collective assumptions. We don't think black people are lesser creatures deserving of bondage and abasement. We know they are. We know gay people are crazy. We know what kind of parents are the wrong kind. We know so much of which we have no experience at all. We are never free from the repetition of the same cruel injustice over and over until we stop knowing. If history is any guide, we should be very, very concerned about the things that we think we know.

Faith in ambiguity is the doubt of the mindful, the practice of asking "Why?" of everything, but most especially, of ourselves. Faith in ambiguity, is not, however, a license not to choose. The worst thing we can do, in my opinion, is fail to choose. In the absence of choice, Life drags us along by our ankle and we hit our heads repeatedly on the concrete as events fly by us, which we have observed but never been the author of.  Life presents you with decisions, and, if you are like me, you consider everything from the polarity of the earth to the astrological signs of the people involved, and then belabor that decision until it is worn down to a tiny nub of a thing, chewed through with agitation. And then you just select and live with the result. Every time you do, you end up upright, able to say, at least "Oh, well, that was not the best decision I ever made."

Faith in ambiguity is also not ignoring the facts. It is not sticking your fingers into your ears and saying that nothing is clear so you are going to ignore overwhelming evidence in favor of whatever inclination it is easiest to bear. Not knowing leads the scientist to conduct her experiment, a mathematician to find his equation, a philosopher to observe and enlarge on our views of humankind. It does not, on the other hand, alter the course of history in any meaningful way to throw out the controls, pretend that two equals three and suppose a new and implausible kind of human. It's just make-believe.  Faith in ambiguity is about facing the facts. If there is crap on the living room floor, it is about saying so, not imagining that really there is a Tootsie Roll. What is in question here is really the motivation of the dog.

I need to write to soothe my itchy brain, and I am so grateful that you show up and apply aloe. What I really want for this blog is to create a space on that internet that holds apart the crushing walls of surety and ill humor and allows us to laugh at silly, stupid things and to speak our mind respectfully without fear of retribution. I want to have this be a place where people come to take a second look, and sometimes to stop and giggle between those hard glances. So, I have this mission to spread a little faith in ambiguity out into the world–just cast out my little whirling dandelion seed of an idea upon its breezes–and see what happens.

Are you in?

Passages from the FBI File on Tara Adams

Photo Credit: Flickr by Cliff

1. March 1, 1983. Our subject, born Tara Kathleen Gordon in 1975, recently came to the attention of the government due to her involvement with a group known only to the Bureau as "Scissilla." We believe this to be a code name for some sort of terrorist organization. Today, an agent engaged the subject in conversation in her third grade classroom, having assumed the guise of a friendly substitute teacher. Tara spoke freely and, in fact, passionately about Scissilla and her beliefs surrounding it and its related worlds (or perhaps, cells), while cantering back and forth and twisting the hem of her dress. (It was noted, by the agent, perhaps irrelevantly, that she was the only girl in her grade not wearing jeans.) Tara claimed that Scissilla exists in a parallel Universe which connects to ours through a magic waterfall. In Scissilla, she claims, everyone lives as a shepherd or farmer and is at peace with the world, practicing no violence. There is though, according to the subject, a neighboring world, Jipsivan, which is currently attacking both Scissilla and its surrounding worlds. Tara believes that "Jipsie" agents are currently at work on Earth and that she, a native of Scissilla, has been reborn here in order to stop them. After consideration, the Bureau believes this issue may be more germane to the field of psychiatry than national security. Due to the seriousness of any charge of terrorist activity, we will, however, maintain a file on Ms. Gordon.


2. August 15, 1994. Tara Gordon again came to the attention of the Bureau today while attempting to board a plane from Boston, having carried a double-edged knife to the security line. This peculiar series of events, which suggest a miscalculation in our previous decision to suspend surveillance of this subject, played out as follows. The nineteen year-old Ms. Gordon approached the TSA personnel at security proffering an elaborately decorated dagger and a polite expression. She explained that she had purchased this item in a store in Ocean Point, Maine for the purpose of giving it as a gift to her boyfriend and had then taken a car and Greyhound bus to Logan Airport, where she and her mother now planned to travel back to the San Francisco Bay Area. It had occurred to her at some point, she illustrated, that perhaps there might be a problem with transporting this knife onto an airplane and, in order to avoid having her baggage seized, decided that the best course of action would be to pack the item in carry-on and then retrieve it, to reveal to the TSA personnel, so that, with her accompanying explanation, they need not be alarmed about her bringing it on-board. However, at the point of her brandishing a dagger illegal in the state of Massachusetts in an international airport, things soured quite suddenly and the authorities were contacted. When agents arrived, in the guise of a small group of Hari-Krishnas, events found Ms. Gordon in tears over the loss of her dagger, which she claimed was a religious item, and the degradation of her character that accompanied this experience. Strange as it may seem, it is this agent's impression that Ms. Gordon was not engaged in a terrorist act, but was instead acting on a sort of ridiculous, unproved faith in the inherent eagerness of the world to understand her intentions. Naturally though, the file will remain open and very limited surveillance will commence, to protect the government's interests.


3.  October 27, 1994. A thorough background investigation into Tara Gordon received today reveals some troubling items. Apparently, there has been some question as to the patriotism and American values of her family going some ways back throughout their history. Her father's family hails, not insignificantly, from Russia, but her mother's family, although not Bolshevik by lineage, is worse. Apparently, Ms.Gordon's maternal grandfather, one A.Powell Davies, longtime Unitarian minister of All Souls Church in Washington D.C., was an antagonist to the government during the years of his peak influence. His FBI file reveals notes stating that Rev. Davies awoke every morning before dawn and worked at a printing press underneath his house, producing Communist propaganda which he would later distribute about the family's neighborhood. (It is noted that his wife, Muriel Davies, was later observed frequently to have said that not only was her husband not a Communist but that he never arose early enough to do anything before dawn.) Evidence of un-American sympathies does not end there, however. Rev. Davies was actively critically from his pulpit, of the activities of the House Un-American Activities Committee, and his church provided gifts of drawing supplies to the children of Hiroshima following the bombing which ended the war with Japan, a clear act of traitor-ship.
   
   His daughter, Bronwyn Gordon, is perhaps even more questionable if somewhat less influential. On no less than seven separate occasion, a note has been made by TSA employees of Ms. Gordon's behavior when passing through security at airports, her presence at the previously mentioned dagger incident notwithstanding. Her comments have included statements such as "Well, did you find an explosive?," "It's not as if I have a BOMB!" and "If you search my disabled client inappropriately, I will call the police!" It seems that Ms. Gordon also lived for a time with her then husband, Tara's father, in a tepee, on some land that did not belong to either of them, in the state of Washington. Both Rick Gordon and Bronwyn Gordon's presence in Berkeley in the Summer of Love is also a damning piece of evidence against them. At this time, both of them were caught up in notions of  "people's power" and it is suspected that they may have consumed illegal street drugs.
   
   Ms. Tara Gordon herself, the new report reveals, was present at the Gulf War protests in the company of a friend who strongly resembled Jesus Christ but was 6'2" and photographed wearing both a Russian ear hat and a pin bearing the hammer and sickle. This friend later joined the Trotskyist Party and remains, we find, an avid Trotskyist to this day. Ms. Gordon herself at this time referred to herself alternately as a utopian socialist, an anarchist and a faery. Clearly, we must keep a close watch on the activities of Tara Gordon. At some point, she will be caught in act of outright terrorism.


4. March 1, 2012. After close to thirty years of observing this subject, we believe it is finally time to close the file on the 36 year-old woman now dubbed Ms. Tara Adams. After what seemed a disturbing trend toward terrorist socialism at a young age, Ms. Adams has settled into bland normalcy in all of her daily dealings, year after tiresome year. It is noted that she has produced three children of unusually troublesome temperament, but this cannot necessarily be construed as a terrorist act. Periodically, Ms. Adams, or her husband–an outspoken Unitarian in the same vein as her grandfather–will make a remark worthy of notation in this file, but no action ever comes of this, and their activities reveal a pattern of soccer games, vegetable consumption and medical appointments. After Ms. Adams began writing her blog, Faith in Ambiguity, in 2010, it slowly became clear to agents studying her that the initial impressions of field envoys in 1983 were correct. Ms. Adams is clearly a case for psychiatry, but not, it seems, for the FBI. As of today, the file of Ms. Adams is officially closed and all investigation into her bizarre activities will cease.

I have this parenting gig well in hand.

I have reached the stage of my blogging career where I am prostituting everything I write on virtual street corners. I say prostituting, except that I am getting paid in comments and page views instead of cash.

I wrote a letter to give my son Rowan, in honor of his adolescent coming of age ceremony Sunday, and he will not allow me to publish it to my blog. That I wanted to publish it–and that he said no–are not, in and of themselves, terribly problematic. What troubles me is that the evil desire to do it anyway is like a crumb in my bed sheets. I itch to publish every single artfully strung together collection of words that I produce. It happened again today, when I emailed a blogger friend, continuing a delightful back and forth which I look forward to the way other people anticipate American Idol. Afterward I thought, when I had sent the email, that there were some good lines in there. And yet I sent them in an email and can't post them on my blog.

Here begins my spiral into serious mental illness. Have you conversed with me in the staff room? If I tossed off a clever line, be sure to look for it later on Faith in Ambiguity. Heart to heart conversations with my kids? Captured on audio to be later transcribed into pieces for Blog Her. Pillow talk? Recorded for posterity. Look for my shopping lists to appear on Twitter. Nothing I write is unworthy of your public consideration.

I have clearly lost all sense of perspective and purpose.

Maybe I'm dreaming of whoring out my day-to-day written communications because I can't seem to write anything else today. I sat down this morning and spent forty-five minutes on a single paragraph. The topic metamorphosed from spiritual transformation to writing advice to reflections on working with teenagers. I deleted more text than I committed. After carefully sculpting one single sentence with the same effort that Pygmalion beget Galatea, I looked at what I had written and realized that it was self-involved twaddle so boring I didn't even want to read it. And so, whooshing down the drain went the carefully safeguarded writing time for which I sacrifice sleep, exercise and worldly accomplishment.

I am, however, making this lost time up now through a means which is the tried and true stand-by of parents whose muse strikes at the wrong time: Parental neglect.

This is O.K. Many parents have pursuits which are important to them, and to their other family members, I tell myself, and these can sometimes cause disruption to the evening routine. Par for the course. One practice many parents seem to have abandoned is the preparation of dinner. This, at least, is the only conclusion I can draw from the following typical description of an afternoon's activities as related to me by mothers made of much stronger stuff:

"In five minutes Little Bobby and Betsy will be home. I have to take Betsy to violin lessons and Bobby to hockey. After that, my husband Jim is going to be home briefly before he heads out with Betsy to soccer practice. Then I promised to bake cookies and bring them to a PTA meeting. So I should go now."

I guess I can't do as much as other people. My feeling is I can  hold down a job or I can clean the kitchen. I can either have three children or go to the Post Office. But not both. That is much to much for me. However, I can damn well cook.

Clearly, these people are doing it wrong. They are serving their kids crap. Or sandwiches. Which are pretty much the same thing. What I do, on the other hand, is carefully plan and prepare nutritionally balanced meals with two or three varieties of vegetables apiece. I put these in front of my kids every night and afterwards, we compost them. It's part of the cycle on Nature.

So at least my neglected children, whose right to privacy has been undermined at every turn, will have had the opportunity to look at produce every night. And I can rest easy, knowing I have this parenting gig well in hand.

So You Want to Know About Flavored Condoms?: Parenting is a Very Weird Job

Photo Credit: Flickr

Three years or so ago, when my oldest son was in fifth grade, I went to his elementary school to collect him from an afternoon Homework Club. He had finished his work, but needed to look for a misplaced hoodie, so we wandered the quiet halls for some time while he tried to locate it. As we gave up and were returning to the entrance, past classroom doors where dedicated teachers still labored over tomorrow's lesson plans and yesterday's papers to be graded, he asked me, with a curious voice loud and clear as a bell,

"Is it true that there are flavored condoms?"

To this I quickly replied that I would prefer that we discuss the matter after leaving his school, and he assented without embarrassment.

Later, I cajoled my husband into speaking with him about flavored condoms, homosexuality and a number of other topics which required some re-education, after the initial tutelage of classmates with incompatible religious views or odd ideas of human sexuality.

No, sex does not hurt. Or at least, it shouldn't.
No, the purpose of Sex Ed. in the schools is not to instruct humans in how to have sex lest they fail to undertake this activity and cause the sudden extinction of the entire race.
Yes, people do actually do that. No, it's not as gross as it sounds.

Et cetera. Et cetera.

One thing a future parent does not particularly imagine for oneself when fantasizing about their future lifetime with their growing child is their role as a sex educator. If we did imagine this, it would really put a damper on the baby-making, I think. It's kind of a gross thought.

I am lucky in that our religious denomination does offer a course for middle schoolers on the subject, which is oddly called OWL (Our Whole Lives), so at least some of the particulars of in-depth sexual education are taken off my hands.

But, by fifth grade, in my experience, normal boys are curious enough to have Googled 'hot chicks" on the family computer, inquired about flavored prophylactics and garnered a host of bizarre information about sex from their dealings with other sexually inexperienced males of their own age. So, you really can't get out of it.

I have not yet ventured into the world of parenting a potentially sexually active child, since my older ones are still in the process of going through puberty, but there are things that deeply worry me about this.

When I was a teenager, the thing to do was to buy condoms from machines that had been installed in bathrooms at colleges and cafes. This was completely discreet, if somewhat more expensive. Word spread around about where these could be found and kids knew where to get birth control on the fly. This probably prevented any number of children from being born, who would now be twenty year-old nervous wrecks.

I have not checked out the various bathrooms at gas stations in my small town, since I am a married woman of thirty-six with a desire not to even touch a gas station bathroom, but I hope that they have condom machines. Because the alternative is too horrific even to describe.

I live in a town of 12,000 people. We have one grocery store in our town, and it is like the town square. You can't go in there to get a quart of milk or a box of decongestants without running into five people to whom it would be rude not to say hello, and fifteen more that you recognize on sight and know by name. I am never buying anything nefarious since my life has for years been given over to the acquisition of copious produce, lactose-free beverages and children's toothpastes, so there is no need to feel embarrassed, but I would hate to have to purchase any intimate products locally.

The condoms and lubricants at Smith's are situated directly opposite the check-out lines, in plain view of God and everyone. You have to stand next to them in rather an uncomfortable way to get your prescriptions at the pharmacy. This is particularly entertaining when some poor woman is there with her sick toddler, waiting behind a sluggish line five people deep, while attempting to contain her child either in a stroller, or in her arms. Given the arrangement created by the narrow aisle with condoms to the right, cigarettes to the rear and tables of discounted vitamins to the left, it is impossible to place a stroller such that a child who can sit up and reach will not be able to grab hold of whatever catches their fancy. At eye level to a stroller are the lubricants, which are packaged in hues of vibrant electric purple, ravishing red and glossy pink. Without fail, children go for these items.

"Mommy, I want this!," the child will exclaim with delight and anticipation.

The mother, upon realizing the situation, with a look of blushing pink horror, then snatches the libidinous liquid from her child, and tries desperately to interest the toddler in a bottle of vitamins to hold while the long wait continues, all without attracting undue notice. All four other people in line watch with total amusement.

"I don't want this! I want that, Mommy!"

And a tantrum ensues.

I could no more imagine purchasing condoms or lubricant from this place than I could conceive of bumming smokes from a nun. Especially if I was a teenager. The clerks know who everyone is, to whom everyone is related and what health conditions we all have.

Privacy, I think, is something you sacrifice to live in cozy places.

So, I guess time will tell whether I will become the sort of parent who places all my bets on the hope that my boys will be abstinent throughout high school, or the kind who leaves condoms hidden all over the house for them to find, in a desperate hedge against the possibility of becoming an extremely young grandmother.

Parenting is a very weird job.

My Husband is Saving the World with Faith in Ambiguity

Updated 1/16: I included the YouTube of his sermon below, so now you can actually watch it.

Despite being very annoying, and having a strange sense of humor, my husband sometimes does cool things.

One cool thing he is doing is delivering this sermon at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Santa Fe today.

He has written a lot of very good sermons, all of which can be found on his blog, All Things Reasonable, but this one is the best so far.

It is the best both because of his amazing development as a writer, which I can't say enough about, and because he is so right about what he is saying.

We live in a world where everyone thinks they know a bunch of things that they actually don't know. And so we fight with our spouses and kids. And so we go to war. And so our political system is broken. We don't know how to separate what we know from what we believe.

What might be possible if we could do this one, critical thing?

How Spiders Saved My Son From Eternal Damnation

Photo Credit: Flickr

In case you don't know, we are Unitarian Universalists. Which means that, at least by the standards of our religion, we are not raising blasphemer heathens, although I realize that this might make very little difference to you, if you are already inclined toward thinking that way.

But, if that's the case, you really shouldn't read my blog anyway.

For a long period of time my eldest son, Rowan believed in Santa Claus but did not believe in God.  Because, hello, Santa keeps filling his stocking, people. What the hell has God done for him lately?

Don't answer that.

Anyway, that's fine if you are a U.U. We encourage our kids to think these things over and "build their own theology".

(crickets)

Anyway, my littlest had spent all of kindergarten an avowed atheist, which kind of got on my nerves, because if you believe in leprechauns, faeries, bathroom monsters, Rudolph and the magic blue light that can be used to protect you from the monsters no one sees but you, I find no cognitive dissonance in just going ahead and believing in God.

I am an atheist. In the sense that I don't believe in a conscious force guiding the universe. This is what most people mean by God. What I mean by God, when I do claim to believe in God–which I sometimes do–is that we are all connected, that a kind of sacred life force runs through everything–not in a supernatural way–but in a biological, relational, natural sort of way.

(more crickets)

Anyway, I would just as soon my kid not inform other kids in kindergarten that God is not real, have them tell him that he is going to Hell, and then have the other kid get in trouble. And so on. And I think that this particular child, who is a very imaginative, magical, Waldorf-y sort of child should get to have the supernatural if it makes him happy. Reason will catch up with him soon enough. But I could never convince him to re-language his atheism into anything more palatable, such as

"I don't believe God is a person." or

"I believe God is the Universe." or some-such.

Until his first grade class did a unit on spiders.

So, today he comes home and states that
"When I said God didn't exist, it was because I thought there were two Gods–the one that exists and the one that doesn't exist–but now I believe God is the Web of Life."

He goes on.

"Mom! I want to have a God party. I want to have a web of life party."

 I say, "Oh, what will we have to eat at this party?"

 "Web of life cupcakes." he says.

"It will be at Urban Park. Can we have it there? Please, Mom?"

I can just see the invitations now.


Update: I originally published this post in October. Tonight Mikalh brought up the subject of spiritual first grade parties again. What he proposed is that we gather his friends for a sort of natural Genesis party, but that first there first be auditions for parts in a play to take place there.

Mikalh: "I think I will have to ask Grandma Valerie for help to make me some costumes. I don't have any 'How-Life-Came-to-Be' costumes."

Me: "What exactly is a 'How-Life-Came-to-Be' costume? Can you give me an example?"

Mikalh: "There will be lots of costumes! Things like a dinosaur and a meteorite. I could be the meteorite."

And this is why I'm reluctant to schedule play dates for him.

THAT is what life feels like when you are a misfit.

I seem to have a new, totally free built in fibromyalgia alarm clock that wakes me up at 6 AM, despite the fact that I am on vacation. It uses nausea, burning muscle pain and the overwhelming urge to stretch instead of a buzzer.

Photo by Paul Downey

So I write. Because God gave me fibromyalgia so I would write. Or because he's an asshole. Or because he doesn't exist and, infuriatingly I have fibromyalgia for no reason. One of those. But this morning I woke up and looked at all the Reverb writing prompts that I have missed, or that are coming, and realized I can't write on any of them because I'm a misfit.

One is asking if my life was a board game, what it would be like. I just can't answer that without sounding like an asshole, so I won't. I have no specific memory of, or interest in, my favorite Christmas gifts, given or received, and you will NOT want to read my post on whether or not I am a romantic person or "more non-traditional." All of my responses to these posts will serve only to prove that something is terribly wrong with me.

Do you know how you feel when you are excited to be around people with a common interest and you're all getting warmed up to share about what you really think? Imagine this scene:
You are about to meet with a group of these other people, almost all of the same gender as yourself, to discuss and engage in the thing that you do that is closest to your heart-whatever that is. Acting. Gardening. Calligraphy. Whatever. Maybe it's something you don't get to share about a lot with other people because you don't happen to have many friends with that common interest. So, sharing your thoughts and your work here is going to be a blast. You arrive at the event in question slightly late, after the discussion has already just begun and slip quietly into a seat. You're so excited, having been looking forward to this as if it is the answer to some question you didn't even know to ask. This is going to be great.

And it begins with a get-to-know-you exercise. Someone addresses the room, "What is most important to you in life?" The first participant, an attractively dressed woman, quickly raises her hand and confidently says "Dental floss!" Everyone else nods in enthusiastic agreement.

Well, THAT is what life feels like when you are a misfit. You are always smiling and nodding while people talk about their personal (and strangely abusive sounding) relationship with Jesus and their deep love of nail polish and romantic comedies while you are wondering how quickly you can find a way to be in another room without being rude.

This is why I am married to Mike Adams. He shares my inability to make small talk. The two of us together are the worst possible couple to have at a light social hour and the best two people to ruffle the feathers of a committee of church members on any subject. Our social interactions go like this:

Normal Person:  (sweetly) "So how are you guys? How have you been?"

Me: "Well, at long last, I finally learned that I suffer from fibromyalgia so I've been exploring and writing on the nature of pain and how it defines our sense of self. Going through this illness and the process of trying to get a diagnosis and the effect that it's all had on my social ties; it's allowing me to reflect on the whole idea of compassion and see where it is that we stop practicing compassion, and the tremendous cost of that......Oh, and how are you?"

NP: "Fine....I guess. I've been...skiing. Tara, have you seen Dr. Dung? She's a great Oriental Medicine doctor?..."

Mike: "I think that what Tara's pointing to is the larger societal cost of our lack of compassion, by contrast to who we say we are. For instance, here at church, we begin every service with the statement, 'Whoever you are, wherever you are on your life's journey, you are welcome here.' But then, do we really live that? Are we actively welcoming people of different theological perspectives? People of limited means?"

NP: "Sounds...interesting. I think I left my....

Mike: "This country passed a law called 'No Child Left Behind' and yet we are leaving children behind all over the place. People in this country, on Indian reservations and other places as well, live in abject, third-world poverty. Why is this acceptable to us?"

NP: "It isn't."

Mike: "It IS."

And so on. This is why we have to be Unitarians. Sorry about blowing off the writing prompts.

The Poetry of My Last Twenty-four Hours: Words that Cut to the Bone of Truth

I invite you to re-visit this post from last December as part of A Writer Weaves a Tale's Old-Post Resurrection Hop. Check Sandra out. She's a brilliant writer and her blog a way-station for talent.

Words that cut to the bone of truth, sawing away muscle and fat, leaving bare the skeleton of what it means to be human, in all its starkly bloody glory.

Words that take me to the heart of who I am and what I feel.

Photo by Mark

The Poetry of My Last Twenty-four Hours

5 AM. The pain of my fibromyalgia has woken me up to send ripples of flame that spread down my forearms and lick the web between each finger, bringing me moment by moment further from the sleep my body desperately needs. A deeper, hotter fire pours down the column of my spine and fills my sacrum, making it a vessel of aching cramp. A persistent nausea pulls at my insides. 

In the war between discomfort and exhaustion, discomfort has won. I will get up. I will write.

Photo by Jilly

2 PM. The baby that my arms still remember, who smelled of a fresh sweetness as bafflingly ambrosial as a morning bakery, the boy whose soft possibility touches the core of my longing to want good in the world, that boy is sobbing on my couch, having been physically and mentally wounded in his daily battle with Life. 

His cries feel like jagged glass, like punches to my stomach.

At this moment in time, his soul is a crushed tin can beneath the foot of the world. His body curls inward, protecting himself. He is a fetal image again, a sprouting bean, or something bent-maybe not yet broken. I catch my breath, and beg myself for the capacity to remember that this is just a moment in time that can pass. 

If I let myself live inside that strangled sob, inside that inward-bent body, I may soon be crushed again myself, as I was when I had to pass through Scylla and Charybdis to become a grown woman myself. But I will not let him pass through alone, if he could know someone is with him and that he is loved. 

Something is always torn and bloody when a child is birthed. New tears rend me as they grow and I let myself feel the disquiet of Life as it shapes the men they will become. Sometimes all I have to offer these children is an outstretched hand.

Photo by Jenny Downing

6 PM. My church community has gathered in the darkness of December around an elaborate double spiral of pine boughs in our icy church parking lot, to usher in the winter solstice. 

The planning for this has been halting, filled with confusion, miscommunication, and emotional exhaustion. Leading up to this moment, I have felt more than once like stepping away from the project. 

Community is never what you think it is. It is always unkempt, filled with unintended power struggles and accidental slights; with the tireless wars we launch daily in the practice of attempting to live together.

Chanting begins, led by teenagers with a chant they have learned at a youth con, "Spiraling into the center, the center of the web, we are the weavers, we are the woven ones, we are the dreamers, we are the dream..." The background is punctuated by the sounds of the reverse signal of a backhoe that is moving snow nearby into great useless dunes by the roadside. 

Our community-elders, young children, teenagers, adults are moving into the center of a spiral, holding tiny pine cones to drop into a fire as an act of letting go. Upon reaching the center, they receive a candle and place it where they wish among the boughs on the arm of the spiral leading out. I am directing a child on crutches in an icy parking lot, listening to a persistent beeping, but, more-so, I am enveloped by the intention of the ritual. 

I desperately need to let go. I need to leave the self I thought I was in the light of summer in that fire and walk out with a new self, strong enough to meet the challenges Life has chosen, in its dazzling randomness, for me to face. I will do this, even if I must do it while prodding a crippled child whom, unbeknownst to me, I will later learn has already fallen with his crutches on the ice and suffered a concussion.

Photo by Kristine Coblentz

"Return again. Return again. Return again. Return to the home of your soul. Return to who you are. Return to what you are. Return to where you are. Born and reborn again. Return again..."

The comfort of the truth of these words washes over me. Where sweet encouragement to cheer me would sour in my ears, the beauty of darkness juxtaposed with light, the Truth of Nature and of being human holds me like a child in a mother's arms, comforting me with reality.

Litany. In the greatest darkness. Response: The light is reborn. Out of winter's cold. The light is reborn. From our deepest fears. The light is reborn. When we most despair. The light is reborn.  The light is reborn. The light is reborn. 

To end the ritual is my part. I lead the crowd inside, where seven children, fourth grade to ninth, guide us all competently, confidently, and gorgeously in the act of welcoming in the four directions and putting the ritual to rest. 

They say, finally, these words that I have written for them:

"The wheel of the year spins inward toward dark and quiet, outward toward light and creation. Again and again, it spins, and our lives spin with it, through happy times and sad, new inspirations and times of letting go.

Our lives mirror the beauty of the turning of the wheel.

We hope you will stay with us for cider and social time and that you will take with you the collective light of this community into the dark places you must go this coming year, and use it to germinate your dreams." 

I am bursting with pride in my community. We are raising bold children who know beauty, who can lead, who can think. We have wisdom among our elders in Los Alamos that would be the envy of any convocation of sages. Our families are vibrant, seeking, and strong.

In this moment, it is worth it to be human in a community, to suffer through emails that I don't understand, to bake a dozen cookies while getting ready for work, to attend meetings at the end of exhausting days, to struggle with how to live in beloved community.

I think that it is worth it to love the poetry of dark and light, to love the shadows that play around the edges of our lives, for the depth that they add to living.

If I live with more pain because I take the time to see them, I say I live, too, with more beauty.

Photo by Patrick Kelly

 This song makes me catch my breath and remember.

Notes on photos: The first three photos are creative-commons licensed searchable images that I found on Flickr. The fourth is a photo taken by my incredible, inspiring friend Kristine Coblentz at the Solstice ritual last night. She should also be credited with taking a huge leadership role in creating that ritual and having it be what it is. Her vision inspires me. The fifth photo was taken by me of my son Devin at our church's UU Nativity Pageant last Sunday, when he was a sheepishly smiling Caesar Augustus. The last photo is used with permission by my talented friend Patrick Kelly, whose gorgeous photographs can be found at http://photos.pmkelly.com/. Go look at them.

My husband says these amazing, insightful, horrifying true things to people.

My husband delivered a Forum (not a sermon, but more of a speech followed by discussion) at our church this last Sunday on 9/11. Below is a link to the text format of that address. His talk was about the lessons of September 11, 2001, and where we are ten years later. They asked him to talk because they knew that he would say something unexpected, brilliant and provocative. I agree. I was afraid it would be too provocative, so I was hiding upstairs in a room full of middle school kids. Once I found out that no one had stood up during his talk and threatened to hurt him, I was sort of sad I missed it.

I think Mike is really smart, and not just because he can do all my sewing and computer maintenance. He is one of those people that really says all of the things that you think of saying to other people, or groups, but you never do because you are afraid they will all hate you. Wait, I'm talking about myself...

You should read his blog.

This is the logo for Unitarian Church of Los Alamos, 
designed by the brilliant and talented Kristine Coblentz.

September 11

 
The tenth anniversary of September 11 is not funny.

There is no kind of snarky remark I could make about this that would be worth making. It is a shattering memory.

At the time that it happened, I didn't have cable. It was only years later that I saw the video images. I did, however, hear the voices of people in the street, played unedited on KPFA. It filled me with grief. And, in that, moment, I felt connected with every human being who has ever witnessed the thoughtless terrorism of war.

The event fit neatly into an impression on my soul already left by something I had seen when I was nine or ten, peering undetected into a room where adults watched television; a documentary on Hiroshima, an animation, wherein a child was left clutching a mother's hand, off of which skin fell like a cast off shell, a baby bathing who was suddenly and instantly distorted into a grotesque creature with its eyeball falling out of its socket. Melting. People. Melting. The animation began with an image of children pointing at an airplane overhead, the way children do.

For years, every airplane overhead called to mind the thought of nuclear annihilation. I was confronted viscerally by a horror and evil I had never been able to fully imagine before.

And, on September 11, 2001, I was again in the presence of horror and evil. It occurred to me then, with a deep sadness, that this kind of horror unites anyone in the world struck by the misfortune to live through its occurring.

It makes me deeply, deeply sad about being human, and at the same time, moved by my own experience of compassion.

What else can you say? What else is there to say?

Here is poem by my mother, the inimitable Bronwyn  "B" Gordon:

So sure of the necessity,

The people who order these deaths;

All the horrified Japanese women,

All the terrified Vietnamese children,

Running and burning, burning and dissolving

Into charcoal silhouettes, into ash...

And the people in the North Tower,

And the people in the South Tower,

Pragmatically and ideologically speaking --

In the righteous minds of the powerful,

All necessary deaths.

Personal Credo for My Building Your Own Theology Class

credit NASA Goddard Photo and Video

Building Your Own Theology is an adult education course offered in Unitarian Universalist churches. Since our denomination does not have any test of faith or required beliefs and we covenant to affirm and promote a free and responsible search for truth and meaning, this class is designed to lead one through the kinds of questions and explorations that would lead you to be able to determine what it is that you personally believe about Life, Ultimate Reality (God), human beings and what is right, and then to take the step of expressing this in the form of a credo. I took this class this fall and then was sort of lovingly prodded into actually reading the damn credo I wrote to our whole congregation, along with one other brave soul. I did that today. After all that work, I decided I should at least be able to steal what I wrote for my blog.

Here it is.
(click the link above for audio podcast, which includes another speaker, T.J. Ulrich, who is fully worth listening to in his own right)

I decided to take the latest Building Your Own Theology class not because I didn’t have a theology already of sorts, already, but because the struggle to fully articulate it has plagued me for the last couple of years.

In the class, we did a lot of reflection on where we have been religiously at different points in our lives and what we choose to reject and keep from all of that experience. I was struck that, there are lots of other people whom I know for which anything religious has seemed tangential to their inner lives. For myself, as long as I can remember, I have been engaged with religious and spiritual questions. I have developed theological ideas from my youth in a Unitarian Universalist church, from a young adulthood as a practicing Pagan, from the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous and years lived as a sober person, from multiple seminars that I have taken as an adult, from Bill Maher, from the Flying Spaghetti Monster people, and now from my adulthood in a UU church.

Not all of these ideas work well together.

Photo by gb_packards

Since I have experience of the unique benefits each perspective has to offer, I have found it challenging to coherently express the sum of my religious beliefs. Often, I find it easier to reject an idea that is offered up. I wanted to be able to speak in the affirmative.

The basic problem for me has been that I require a spiritual life. For my happiness and emotional well-being, everything in my experience tells me that I need to feel part of something larger than myself, and that this something needs to be not just a social movement, not just a set of ethical principles, but something which can connect my inner life with my outer life, and ultimately, with Everything. This is a problem because I just can’t accept the easy answers. As a matter of integrity, I can’t believe something just because it would make me happier to do so or because others believe it. It has to make sense. It has to provide direction. It has to work under any circumstances. I guess that’s my UU breeding.

Periodically, someone challenges me about why I call myself an atheist and not an agnostic. I guess my answer is that agnosticism seems to me to work only if the question of God is not terribly important to you. To me the question is paramount because every day I wake up into a world in which, either there is a Creator who has a plan for my life, wherein my main job is to do good things and trust in the unfolding of that plan, or I wake up into a world where there is no justice that we don’t strive for ourselves, where suffering is not offered up as part of a menu of spiritual refinement but is simply, suffering.

In this second world, I have enormous responsibility for how things go. My actions and ethics would be entirely different given either of those two worlds. So, for myself, I have to make a choice about God, if not forever than at least to go forward with. While others may say God and mean “Universe” or “Ultimate Meaning” or “Interconnected Web of Life”, I find it distracting, like saying “cheeseburgers” every time you mean “houses”.

So I needed to articulate the path that I am already on, a path which offers me a great deal of fulfillment and meaning and which has seen me through many dark days. What follows is my attempt to express it in the form of a credo.

I believe that to be human is to constantly encounter Paradox.

The consciousness that I have developed as I gained the ability to produce language tells me that I am separate and whole unto myself, with unique thoughts, perspectives and traits. In fact, my individuality is what makes me who I am—the uniquely valued wife of my husband, daughter of my parents, mother to my three boys. Yet, at the same time, I am just one iteration of an evolving Universe fully beyond my understanding.

My bones, skin and brain are particles of stardust that have existed since the moment Existence ever was, and will take another form after me, time and time again. I will someday exist as matter that no one will recognize, in memories of others that tell only part or half the truth of my story. No matter who I am or was at the end of my days, one day I will surely be part of everything, something unrecognizable.

As part of the fundamental toolbox of my humanity, I can create ideals of justice and compassion out of the thin air of imagination and declaration. I can nurture, heal, transform, give meaning, lend comfort. And, inescapably, I will hurt, self-deceive, and participate in systems that bring death and suffering to fellow humans, fellow animals. My instinct to personally survive, to garner resources, to bring the world as it is into accordance with the world as I need to see it, sometimes wins out over the possibility of Beauty or Compassion or Wisdom, no matter how dear I hold these ideals. I think that we are unwise when we place unwarranted faith in human nature to be anything other than as it is, but I find in the compassion and understanding that I can have for that nature, a peace with the world and a way to practice love.

I think human beings create a concept of God to allow them to connect in some way with that part of themselves that is an expression of what is possible and beautiful, that part of ourselves in which we can quietly find peace and acceptance, that part of our DNA that reacts with love and recognition to all other living things. I do not think that there is a God that is sentient, in any sense larger than that the concept encompasses the sentience of those creatures who happen to have it. I do not think that there exists a God that has a plan of any kind, that the Universe is travelling in a predictable direction, or that inherent fairness from a source larger than humanity will win the day.

While thinking these things may lend comfort to me, and has in the past, I find that wrestling with the task that a masterless Universe presents me with makes me a better person, a person who cannot just sigh to myself in the face of suffering that “God simply has a plan that we don’t understand” and turn away, but am called upon to lend a hand or face the consequences of my inaction.

The ethical creed that arises for me out of my understanding of humanity and Ultimate Reality makes it necessary for me to question everything, to be wary of any and all absolutes that I am offered. I can offer Wisdom in the form of my unique point of view, and so I try to. I can bring Compassion and so I actively strive to bring compassion to my relations with other people and creatures. I can create reality with the words I speak and so I conduct myself with Integrity to whatever extent I can muster.

In a world that can prove no absolute truth of any kind, where our understandings of the machinations of nature are a moving target, where absolute ethics exist only in the form of societal agreements fortified by the imperative that we survive as social creatures, I still find Beauty to be everywhere and human beings most beautiful of all. I see this as the unconditional love that a family has for all of its members. The world and human beings are deeply flawed and imperfect and I love them because they are mine and I live with them. I know no better way to live here than to love the world, just as it is, as it seems, as it spins out its meaningless, gorgeous threads that make up the tapestry of history, and in which we all find our own pattern there to see.

I will end with the thoughts of Ysaye Barnwell of Sweet Honey in the Rock, who has written in her beautiful song, “We Are”:

"For each child that’s born
A morning star rises
And sings to the universe
Who we are.




We are our grandfather’s dreamings.
We are the breath of our ancestors.
We are the spirit of God.




We are Mothers of Courage
Fathers of time
Daughters of dust
Sons of great vision.

We are
Sisters of Mercy
Brothers of love
Lovers of life and
The builders of nations.

We are
Seekers of truth
Keepers of faith
Makers of peace and
The wisdom of ages.”
We are our grandmother’s prayers.

The photos of the cactus wren and the skeleton were taken in Tucson, Arizona by my brilliant son, Devin Cantua. November 2011