Frogger

1/20/08
I am tired tonight.  there were goals I set for the day, and it’s one of those days when I focus more on the unmet than the accomplished.  I cannot rest easy, because I furrow hard.  brow-beating oneself is an indoor wind.   miles, per hour.

this pattern of self-deemed-insufficiency is contagious.  we have crocheted the emotional potholders of life similarly.  regifting not-enoughness can be implicity or explicity, myopic or mitosic.  moment is familiar in descent.

but if you can and will, I can and will climb as well.  as well as a baby recovered from a first flu.  as well as the dart-board amateur who hits a bulls eye on his 10000th throw.  as well as can be more than expected.  climb with me now.  think of the view.

1/24/08
“In the unlikely story of America, there has never been anything false about hope.”  For when we have faced down impossible… it was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation.  yes we can.  it was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they braved a trail towards freedom through the darkest of nights  it was sung by immigrants as they set our for distant shores, it was the call of a King who took us to the mountaintop and pointed us to the promised land.”

it is all too easy to live in doubt.  it doesn’t feel good, but it does feel natural.  but that doesn’t mean it is.  ☺  I often criticize my students for over-using “it.”  “Be more specific,” I say.  “Don’t be lazy,” I imply.  Am I talking to them?  Yes.  Are they my audience? 

Doubt persists despite every mirror.  Each word, each person, each step reflects the apprehension I hold within.  Yet, each moment, each breath, each look gives me a second chance to feel secure, whole, full, safe. 

2/4/08
at 4:15 I awoke, having to pee, but then thought, upon laying back down after making the long trek downstairs to the rest-room, that I should send more emails encouraging more people to vote, to come to the rally, to look at dipdive.com.  I should testify yet again to my belief in Barack Obama, to his vision, courage, transcendence of fear, faith in human capacity.  And I will do that in any free spaces today and tomorrow…but know I too have to have faith. 

When I listened to The Audacity of Hope this summer, my primary thought each time I turned off the car (thereby pausing the recording) was “He’s gonna win.”  I just couldn’t believe he couldn’t if people got to his message.  But he warned that the success of political campaigns in our age is based on how mediated one’s message is through the media.  Bill Clinton said that Barack is getting a “free pass” with the media, and the me-dia came down hard on him.  You are not Me(-dia), they said.  Well, it could turn at any moment and that’s where my faith comes in.

In the last year, six months really, I’ve learned what faith is.  The definition will change but for now it’s that occasionally feeling that everything’s gonna be all right.  That isn’t a rebuttal to news of murder or loss in people’s lives.  Rather, this faith is an opportunity to appreciate the trees, the houses, the faces of people walking by.  I did that before, once in a while, but didn’t see it as faith.  I saw it more as exceptions to the door in which we are all encapsulated.  This inner doubt, which I had faith—whoops!—was a big, invisible umbrella, keeping in the universal shroud of pain, colored the landscape, and gasps of light were mistakes.  Now, when I am present in the day, when I helpful to other people, when I meet people where they are, it’s the other way around.  The light of day is the light of day.  If I slip and fall on the ice, if someone flips someone else off in traffic, if it seems like everyone is mad…that too will pass.  There is opportunity to spread the love.  I have a big butter knife.  We all have metaphorical bread.

Barack Obama knows this.  He’s conducting electricity with his spreader.  But it only works if we all turn the lights on. 

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