Hello, from across the continent. I'm listening to Bon Iver and Param is by my feet. And I'm up past my usual bed time of 10pm at least this last week. I can feel the rhythms evening out as each thing is accomplished, and hammering asphalt intermittently during the day as my upperbody building exercises is enough to make my eyes lightly mist up in encouragement that even that - this measurable output 1/3 done- Sure even as I sat and sighed deeply in satisfaction at 2/5 gardenias planted I noted that they're being attacked by something and that the 2/3 is long as the day is hot in August. But still. We do what we can. We do it where we're at and we don't wait to be anywhere else. To suddenly have money. For pigs to fly. For things to alter themselves when they have always been the way they are.
Mom said that painting the bathroom was not akin to climbing Everest and I quipped and she hurumphed. But each room I think is a mental and emotional battle against my own internal grudges. Deep-seated. Grooves that go really far down into my own heart of darkness. Grooves that have me loosing my shit over craptastic drywall work- lines everywhere, lines cracking through the primer, drywall not flush to the door jamb, weird fucking wonky not perfect shit. I look at the spider like smash I made in the enamel of the bathtub- 3+ years ago by now and I think I made that. I was tired. I swung and I missed and I knew I had to put the sledge hammer down. But this drywall business is just half-assery. I get it. I'm guilty of it, like the floor- there's lines aren't there. But this guy they hired and my dad know better. They aren't novice hacks. I don't know why it enrages me so. Maybe because I feel i'm doing this by myself against the stream of fuckall. I had worship music going for a good while just to push through the inevitably toxic mental churning.
Still it didn't stop me having to scream at someone (poor mom) of the shit job- surely someone has to know. Someone else besides me in my own head all by myself, as I spend each day fighting the gremlins from room to room. And then of course somehow got into a fight with Amber where she was prompted to hold against me all the things she's done for me that I thought were generous of her but apparently not, so of course I should do just this thing out of 'you owe me'. Don't you? And I was reminded of the MM part where he talks about how we economize relationships- and I thought ok i'm not going to do that. I won't tit-for-tat this. But then it led me to wonder what other resentments other people were stacking against me. It goes to what we can possibly repay. We can't. I'm in enough debt as it is- I simply can't keep account to balance out friends- but it's a new way. A new groove. To burn the ledger- and how to love through and in that space. I can't say I know what that looks like.
It's control too and the perfection you know time and money can execute for you. To just have it done. To not labor. As if nothing is learned, gathered or built in the doing of things. Are they really time stealers- or are they like washing the whiteboards or waxing the car- the discipline of carrying through and doing and being mundane creation and maintaining- and how we behave in those spaces and the decisions we make to keep going- hacking at the asphalt, letting the lines lie- weeping, gnashing and then rubbing the imbedded gravel out of our knees and we keep going- to find peace in an imperfect space. To find peace in ourselves.
And then in those meditative spaces I think- God, you must not care about me as I sit here in this imperfect mess and you don't deliver me from it with bags of money or a husband or a friend who won't inevitably hold it against me if I ask for help. And then I hear, it's not important. But I think that's me thinking what God would say, and then I argue back but it's important to me. But then I think what's the aim and the aim isn't perfection, and I think God would agree with me on that. And then what it is - relationship- in those spaces with God and myself in the concrete, and in those spaces in my heart that all of these things trigger. Pondering the verses below as things fly through my head, as I shrug my shoulders from the tension and crack my wrists from the overwork. It would be better if Jesus be my arbiter- against accusations of who I am in the world and to others. It will never be enough without him. So the power of such things must be to walk in faith through them- the small that would make us small- to define myself not by the cracked lines of an atom among many, but by him, who makes me heir and calls me daughter. I have to believe I'll be the better for it.
2cor10:3 For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. 4 The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. 5 We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.
Mom said that painting the bathroom was not akin to climbing Everest and I quipped and she hurumphed. But each room I think is a mental and emotional battle against my own internal grudges. Deep-seated. Grooves that go really far down into my own heart of darkness. Grooves that have me loosing my shit over craptastic drywall work- lines everywhere, lines cracking through the primer, drywall not flush to the door jamb, weird fucking wonky not perfect shit. I look at the spider like smash I made in the enamel of the bathtub- 3+ years ago by now and I think I made that. I was tired. I swung and I missed and I knew I had to put the sledge hammer down. But this drywall business is just half-assery. I get it. I'm guilty of it, like the floor- there's lines aren't there. But this guy they hired and my dad know better. They aren't novice hacks. I don't know why it enrages me so. Maybe because I feel i'm doing this by myself against the stream of fuckall. I had worship music going for a good while just to push through the inevitably toxic mental churning.
Still it didn't stop me having to scream at someone (poor mom) of the shit job- surely someone has to know. Someone else besides me in my own head all by myself, as I spend each day fighting the gremlins from room to room. And then of course somehow got into a fight with Amber where she was prompted to hold against me all the things she's done for me that I thought were generous of her but apparently not, so of course I should do just this thing out of 'you owe me'. Don't you? And I was reminded of the MM part where he talks about how we economize relationships- and I thought ok i'm not going to do that. I won't tit-for-tat this. But then it led me to wonder what other resentments other people were stacking against me. It goes to what we can possibly repay. We can't. I'm in enough debt as it is- I simply can't keep account to balance out friends- but it's a new way. A new groove. To burn the ledger- and how to love through and in that space. I can't say I know what that looks like.
It's control too and the perfection you know time and money can execute for you. To just have it done. To not labor. As if nothing is learned, gathered or built in the doing of things. Are they really time stealers- or are they like washing the whiteboards or waxing the car- the discipline of carrying through and doing and being mundane creation and maintaining- and how we behave in those spaces and the decisions we make to keep going- hacking at the asphalt, letting the lines lie- weeping, gnashing and then rubbing the imbedded gravel out of our knees and we keep going- to find peace in an imperfect space. To find peace in ourselves.
And then in those meditative spaces I think- God, you must not care about me as I sit here in this imperfect mess and you don't deliver me from it with bags of money or a husband or a friend who won't inevitably hold it against me if I ask for help. And then I hear, it's not important. But I think that's me thinking what God would say, and then I argue back but it's important to me. But then I think what's the aim and the aim isn't perfection, and I think God would agree with me on that. And then what it is - relationship- in those spaces with God and myself in the concrete, and in those spaces in my heart that all of these things trigger. Pondering the verses below as things fly through my head, as I shrug my shoulders from the tension and crack my wrists from the overwork. It would be better if Jesus be my arbiter- against accusations of who I am in the world and to others. It will never be enough without him. So the power of such things must be to walk in faith through them- the small that would make us small- to define myself not by the cracked lines of an atom among many, but by him, who makes me heir and calls me daughter. I have to believe I'll be the better for it.
2cor10:3 For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. 4 The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. 5 We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.
