What inspires me today...
leaving the city.
What form of speech would lend itself to describe the fact that the folder on my computer, neatly hidden within My Documents, titled “
Misc,” holds all the writings I’ve chosen to preserve from the past two years? Mostly poems, some fragmented sentiments, a few letters, copy/pasted emails that are still too painful to read but I save so I don’t forget they’re there, and lyrics to songs I typed out while waiting delay after delay at SFO/SBA/LAX/PDX. Is this irony? Most would say no, I would agree. Poetic? Maybe.
Cowardly? Probably. I'm making a conscious decision to move some of those out of that folder and onto the internet, where no one will read them, but I can still feel more adventurous.
Something about how I know every creak, every smell, every secret home has to offer leaves me wanting to reach out for more. A semester in San Francisco has come and gone, leaving me with an extra suitcase full of clothes I don't need, a few more/less friends to go back to at that hilly campus on the shore, and an assignment that Karen made us write in order to sum up our experiences:
Katie Leaves The City
Katie leaves the city; left with no more answers. In their place are two tasks I have in this life: to love my God with all my heart, soul, mind and strength, and to love my neighbor as myself. I have learned to shun certainty, and yet with everything in me, I am certain of the cross, which looms so mightily in my mind. Never have I been so full of compromise and philanthropy, neither succeeding in making it recede. I cry sometimes thinking that I can never be good or terrible enough to dwarf its power. Here I have aged to 21. Next is 30. I never understood that stillness is not a waste of the days that I am not promised, because I have found Jesus wanting to share in my ordinary. I watched a tree all afternoon shed its leaves, one-by-one, each a sacrifice to the tugs of a crisp and well traveled exhale. They soon blanketed the ground, the trunk standing naked. The wind sharpened its teeth, and will hold the fragile frame through the winter, as the tree will wish to gather each precious and loosely tossed sacrifice, now scattered across the world, swimming in the seas.
In a moment I will be looking back at two years of distance, and this time will be a memory of a memory, and I will be different. But never far from my mind will be those crying themselves to sleep because the elite surrounding the cross refuse to let them close, yelling that their burden is too dark to pin upon the pine. I can never let go the string that holds me closely to the people who look me in the eye and refuse to hide me away in a box of ridged absolutes. I now know a God of paradox, who tears apart those boxes and gives me a book full of stories to show me that I am not alone, and that I can love better. I finally don’t know why so many are meant to suffer while others build mansions atop their molehills. Children are raped. Children die. People go to hell. There is no such thing as the fairness we were so certain of when sitting in those single desks in a neat little row; but I know God is good. I know that the tearing and retching of my soul is nothing compared to that of the one who created us so carefully and purposefully from the dirt. He watches as we shed our leaves, and as the winter chaps our skin and stings our eyes, He sews new ones to our frame when the spring returns.
We have never had a manual, we have had a Spirit and each other, so we better treat them both with love, and give all we have in sacrifice. This city has taught me that time is on the heels of my lazy, slow-released love, and that I truly want to love better.
