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February 5 - February 18, 2021
Every story, whether truth or fiction, is an invitation to imagination, but even more so, it’s an invitation to empathy.
The books that I found in the library, ones that I deeply understood and ones that seemed so outside of my experience they might as well have been written in Klingon, all carried the same hopes: to be seen, to be heard, to exist.
Though I do have a constant hum of low-level anxiety about organizing my time, and producing a punchline, and keeping this gig, I still feel like I should be struggling more. Remember how Carrie Bradshaw got drunk at lunch every day and stayed out till four in the morning on dates, and wrote just one weekly column but was still on the side of a bus? I’m not on a bus and I write every day, but I couldn’t help but wonder if I’ve put enough effort in to deserve this.
You work hard so that your children are able to live a life somewhat free from the burdens that plagued you. That’s the gift my parents gave us, free of charge. Or, at least, I assume that’s a parent’s goal. I don’t have any kids but I want those things for my houseplants.
But love? Love seems to have infinite possible beginnings, endings, permutations, subtle shifts, and seismic changes. Love, I’ve learned, is different every time you look at it. Love is every possible love story all at once. Love is a library. And nothing is as fat with possibility as a library.
It’s strange when the thing behind the door isn’t terrifying or wonderful, but rather just plain. When you find your people and realize they’re just people.
The feeling of being alone, I’ve found, is the poison that has no taste.
The idea was intriguing to me but only in the way that television is intriguing to a cat.
Behind the words, Bon Iver wails, “I’m up in the woods / I’m down on my mind / I’m building a still / to slow down the time.”
Still, I wasn’t going to church and I hadn’t in years, but I believed in God and I really didn’t want to go to hell. So, it turned out, hell came to me.
But that place in me that compulsively cried to everyone who would listen is still in me; the bad times don’t go away just because times are good. We say these things build character; they make us who we are. And that’s true. But that doesn’t mean they don’t suck. It doesn’t mean winter isn’t cold.
think the worst thing about winter is that I always think it won’t be that bad, and it always tricks me.
Honestly, I see very little difference between Church and a Beyoncé concert. Maybe that’s the core of my theology: if it makes you feel something ineffable, if it’s bigger than you and yet deeply personal, if it sometimes involves a fog machine, it’s Church.
Easter is about salvation, and salvation is free and available to everyone. Yet so many churches put barriers around it. If our religions aren’t about the business of achieving justice in our time, in this world, for everyone, what are they doing?
