I Still Have a Long Way to Go

“Dissimulation, half answers, vindictive attitudes, a false presentation of self are all barbs in the soul of the monastic. Holiness, this ancient rule says to a culture that has made crafty packaging high art, has something to do with being who we say we are, claiming our truths, opening our hearts, giving ourselves to the other pure and unglossed.” —Joan Chittister from The Rule of Benedict

Just when I think I am moving in a good direction with my life and my attitudes, I get this reminder that I am really just clay, water, and some divine breath. There are a few things that set me off in a really bad, fast, almost flashpoint-anger way. Being called out about things in front of other people is one of those things that sets me off, and there is nothing worse than my unrighteous anger. There is no dignity in responding with the same behavior that angers me to start with.

Yesterday during our faculty meeting, there were several things said that I took personally. Whether they were personally directed at me, or whether they simply felt directed at me, I will never know, but what I do know is that I got angry enough to raise my voice at a colleague and then leave the room. All of this after I just had a conversation with Andy about how I felt that this Lent, studying and writing and making big decisions, had really changed me. I was as angry with myself as I was with my colleagues.

I know that people have bad days, and I know my Wesleyan theology well enough to know that I must keep striving for perfection/sanctification. I know that’s why it’s called sanctifying grace, because it isn’t something that just happens—of course the grace to long for sanctification is a gift—but actually getting there is something that we must strive toward, giving ourself opportunities to learn along the way. Sometimes the learning of these lessons is hard, though, and I end up eating a lot of crow.

I feel like that at some point, I should be able to put away my childlike things and behave like an adult. If you’ve read any other posts in this blog, you’ll know that I don’t really want to be an adult, and I covet those moments when I can recapture some bits of childlike innocence in play or thought. Maybe, in fact, this ”dissimulation, half answers, vindictive attitudes, a false presentation of self” is really adult behavior. Maybe this is what happens to us when we become adults: we get mean. I don’t know many children who behave as badly as many of the adults I know.

I want to be one of those people I love to be around. I want to bring peace and light to every conversation. I want people to leave being with me, like I feel when I leave being with some of my friends. I want people to leave a conversation with me feeling like both of us were changed by the encounter, like we were real and present with each other, paying attention only to the moment between us. Right now, I feel really self-absorbed, distracted, aloof. I want my life to look like this: “being who we say we are, claiming our truths, opening our hearts, giving ourselves to the other pure and unglossed.” I want to exude Christ and him crucified and raised from the dead. I want to offer grace, not condemnation. Basically, I want to live in the image of God, so that I can forget I am simply clay and water, by focusing more and more on the divine breath and the way it breathes through me.

Dissertation. Paleo & Exercise.

As much as I’d love to go around telling each person who has meant anything to me in the process of trying to earn my PhD the following information, I can’t. There are too many of you, so I am writing it here hoping some people actually read these things  and hoping you will not feel betrayed that I am not telling you to your face.

I have made the decision to quit and not finish my dissertation. I am not going to complete my PhD. I am totally and completely okay with my decision. I have not fallen off the academic wagon, and I still feel like I can be a valuable part of the academic community. I am simply choosing to focus on teaching my beloved middle school and high school students, instead of splitting myself between my two loves. I still plan to write and research, but my interest will likely switch from literature and literary theory to literature and teaching literature. Of course, theory will still be a part of that process, but so will pedagogy, methodology, pragmatics, and all of those educational tidbits I’ve been ignoring in my research.

*

I realize I’ve changed my life by eating paleo, and I feel like shit when I eat wheat and corn, so I wonder to myself, “Why is it that you still insist on eating things that make you feel like shit?” There are two pretty obvious reasons: they taste good, and that’s what’s available. I am sure there are other not so obvious reasons, too. On Thursday, at Thirsty Thursday, I decided I had a hankering for a corn dog. Savage’s has corn dogs, so I ate one, and when I woke up the next morning, my belly was bloated, my tongue was swollen and my mouth was on fire. Think there might be an allergy there? I felt horrible, so I decided then and there that non-paleo (or primal if I’m feeling more lax) foods will not be going into my body anymore, no matter how appealing they sound, nor how readily available they are.

In addition to just (sort of) eating whatever I want, I haven’t been exercising the way I want to (or need to). I’ve been sleeping in, instead of going swimming and running. I’ve been couching, instead of going for bike rides or walking the dogs. I’ve been doing pretty much everything to avoid the exercise schedule I’ve created for myself. Because of this neglect, I’ve had to drop out of the Flying Pig half-marathon that’s happening in two weeks. I still have my entry, so I suppose if I feel like it that day, I could head over and make the attempt. I’m pretty sure I could do 16-minute miles for 13.1 miles. Maybe not. Anyway, I haven’t been where I need to be, and as per usual, I decided to “exercise punish” myself. I made up a circuit last night. Four reps with a 3 minute vacuuming break (I was doing housework, too. What can I say?):

1. 10 air squats with the kettlebell
2. 25 kb swings
3. 15 bent rows per side with kb
4. 15 lat rows per side with kb
5. 15 overhead arm extensions with kb
6. 15 tricep extensions with medicine ball
7. 15 per side side to side crunches with mb
8. 15 heel-tapping oblique crunches
9. 15 diamond-bent leg crunches with hands overhead
10. throw the medicine ball up in the air 15 times
11. slam the medicine ball to the ground from overhead 15

For dinner last night, I made lamb chops marinated in Bell’s Porter (which is technically not paleo, but I didn’t drink it), broccoli, and sweet potatoes.

Yummy.

I slept so well, like a little baby. When my alarm went off at six this morning, I got up and ran 2 miles to Ball Pool, swam 1.5 miles, and then ran the two miles home. I ate eggs, bacon, a banana, and some tea for breakfast, then walked down to the park to take tickets for the ball game. It was freezing, so I came home and took a really hot shower before I ate squash, uncured hot dogs, and tea for lunch. Basically, it’s been a beautiful couple of days. My body is sore, but my spirits are reeling. I am so excited for summer and for what my future holds. I’m Pollyanna-ing all the way.

Some Things I Love

1. I love God. I love the way [They] decorate this land every spring and then make it barren every winter. The older I get, the more I appreciate the beauty of this land. I want to capture every single beautiful thing and share it with others. Every morning when it’s light out on my way to teach school, I stop and take a picture of these two trees. This morning was particularly wonderful.
   

   A few sunspots, but a beautiful sky.

2. I love my partner. Even when I am grumpy and don’t want to hear her singing in the morning before 9AM, she can still make me smile by making fun of my grumpy, pouty face. She’s beautiful, and I am so blessed. The past few weeks, since she finished school, have been a blessing. We’ve been able to reconnect in very meaningful ways. Walking at the Mounds every Sunday is one thing we love and one thing we share. Those walks have reconnected our souls.
   

   Aren't we cute?

3. I love my family. We are pretty zany, and sometimes we are a little out of touch with the rest of the world, but we rock nonetheless. My parents are getting older, but they still want to do fun stuff with my brother and me. This summer we are going to the minor league home run derby and all-star game in Buffalo, to Gettysburg, and to Hershey, Pennsylvania. My little brother is one of my best friends, and he takes me to eat oysters, which are also some things I now love.
   

   My little bro.

4. I love art, every type of fine art: drawing, painting, writing, 3-d design, graphic design, photography, theater, music, and all those I haven’t listed. Sometimes I even love bad art, because I think about it as someone trying to say something about this human condition. Good art just makes my heart sing. Good art makes the viewer feel more beautiful, more conflicted, more empowered, more enlightened, more spiritual, more angry, more depressed, more loved simply by being in proximity to it. Sometimes I feel as if I can reach through the art (in whatever form) and touch or feel what the artist was feeling.
   

   Sculpture in Front of Minnetrista

5. I love coffee and tea, but coffee more.
   

   Greek Coffee at The Artist Cafe in Chicago

6. I love my bicycle. I actually love any sports equipment that allows me to move my body. I love my Vibram Five Fingers, my kayak, my basketball, my disc golf discs, my bathing suit, and all of the other things that help me play outside during any season. This is the one of two areas of my life in which I am a little self-indulgent. I own way too much sports equipment.
   

   Zbornak the Bicycle

7. The other area of self-indulgence in my life is food. I love food: the way it looks, the way it smells, the ways it tastes, the way it feels in my mouth. I love experimenting with tried and true recipes, making up my own recipes, and just eating food in its natural state. Really, two things make my heart sing: food and exercise.
   

   Bison Steaks

8. For the purposes of this post, the last thing I love hearkens back to my childhood when I’d sit in my little red wagon on the way to the library watching the trains and waving to the caboosers and engineers. I love trains, and all things railroad. Watching trains roll by fantasizing about hopping on and riding until they stop, walking on the tracks or rails, lying on the ties on the trestle over the river looking down between them smelling the river water roll by. I look down the tracks and think about how blessed I am and how my life is coming into what I’ve always wanted it to be.

Lent Day 38: Relay for Life

Last night Bec and I met up with our friends Sarah and Celeste to walk for a few hours at the Relay for Life. We calculated that we probably walked about six miles while we were there and it was a three-mile trip to get there and back, so we walked about 9 miles last night. My ankles are a little sore today, because I haven’t been walking barefoot as much as I should be, and I haven’t been running at all. I wore my trusty Vibram Five Finger Classics for the walk last night, and my feet love me for it. They were a bit sore last night, but today they feel great. My ankles, not so much, but my feet feel awesome! I love barefooting!

This coming week, since I’ve been unsick for about a week now and my energy is coming back, I plan to make a concerted effort to get up at 5AM to run two miles and then head to Ball Pool to swim two miles every morning. On Fridays, I want to just go swim three miles. I figure running two miles four days a week (Monday through Friday) and then a longer run of at least five miles (on Saturdays) is a good way to get back into the pleasure of running without the pain. It ends up being thirteen miles of running and eleven miles of swimming each week as a good solid base to add onto this summer when I have more time. Bec and I have been going to the Mounds to walk every Sunday, which is a nice way to start the week, but I want to get my body back into shape.

Food Like This Fuels Me: Pork Chops and Spinach Salad

Much of my mental and spiritual well-being hinges on my body feeling well, so when I am not exercising regularly I don’t feel whole. The food I’ve been eating has helped tremendously, and I’ve lost 25 pounds since January 1, but I just want to be able to run and swim without the pain and with the pleasure. I haven’t eaten chocolate or ice cream for a week, which has helped to keep my blood sugar more stable.

I’m not sure what the connection between this post and Lent is, but I can say that I think we are designed to be at an optimal fitness for our own bodies. I’m not by any means saying that we shouldn’t be fat, because I don’t mind being fat nor do I think it is the sin that our love US culture makes it out to be. I mention that I lost 25 pounds, simply because I have. I completely changed the way I eat and what I do with my body, and it’s changed me. Did I set out to lose weight? A little bit, but only because I want to be able to run more, longer, faster, better, because I love how I feel after a nice, long run. Minus the sore feet because I am heavy. The bigger sin, than being fat, might be not using the resources God gave us to make our bodies be the best they can be. Whatever that means for you.

Maybe that’s how this ties into Lent: God wants us to be the best we can be for the sake of worshiping [Them] with no constraints. I suppose it’s kind of like yesterday’s post, in that God wants us to be able to play and worship with reckless abandon. For me, that means being able to move my body in a joyful galumph over trails in the woods, or to move my body like a fish through the lake waters. Beautiful movement = joyful worship.

 

 

Too Many Days of Lent: I’ve Been Revelling in the Weather

How much of a blessing has this weather been?! The trees are bloomed out with leaves and assorted flowers, the wild flowers are brightly colored and diverse, the grass is growing and growing and growing, and the birds wake me up every morning with their anger or sexual desire, whichever is worse I am unsure. They scream and chatter and occasionally whistle and chirp outside our bedroom window at the bird feeders. They are my natural alarm clock, beautiful and harsh.

Every time I look out the window at the beauty of the day, I want school to be over so I can play outside. I want to go swimming, biking, running, disc golfing, kayaking, and I want to do every other activity that someone can do outside! I want to roll down a hill and make myself sick. I want to be free. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again here: God wants us to play. There is a whole theology of play that helps us to better relate to the divine through spontaneous acts of creative play.

Part of play for me is recognizing who I am in Christ and being free from societal constraints. In other words, I feel free to play when I realize that my identity lies in Christ and not in what other people think of me. And, I play with reckless abandon, which means I have a few people in my life that don’t quite understand me. My greatest desire is to be unencumbered by those things that other people see as necessary. My mom always says to other people, “I think she just wants to be poor.” Yeah, I do. I don’t want to be tied down by earthly possessions or monetary things. I never intended to buy a house. I would love to get rid of all my stuff until everything I own or everything I need could fit in my camping backpack. I’m pretty sure that would make me perfect for monastic life, which is still a kind of dream of mine. I’m not sure I want to be monastic in the “I’m celibate and live in a cold cell with a hair shirt” kind of monastic, but more in the new monastic, communal living sort of way where I share things with my community members.

When I am having these thoughts, my morning prayers typically confirm my thoughts or dissuade me from them. Today they confirm with this quote from Peter Maruin, co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement: “The world would be better off if -people tried to become better. And -people would become better if they stopped trying to become better off.” I think living in a self-sustaining community and trying to be better and more compassionate is definitely a way for me to be better off. I think of communities like Simple Way and the way they intertwine work and play in all aspects of their lives.

I would be able to work hard and play hard without trying to conform to some arbitrary economic constraints.

I would only have to please God and provide for my “family.”

I would have plenty of time to revel in the beauty of God’s world and word.

I could play.

Peace.

Lent Day 31: Being a Grown Up Sucks Sometimes

Today’s weather was perfect for a run: 70 degrees with a nice lukewarm rain. As I came home from school today, my heart wanted so badly to go for a nice, long run. My spirit wanted to be unleashed and untethered to plod along the Greenway with my bare feet soaking up the rainwater as they splashed along the trail. I could feel the joy in that run.

I sat by the open picture window, looking out across the green floor boards of our front porch and watching the rain fall in the grass of the front yard. I admit that I have been feeling a little sorry for myself for the past month. My body doesn’t seem to have the same aspirations as my spirit when it comes to running or swimming. For example, today instead of wanting to go run, my body wanted to come into the house and fall asleep on the couch by about 5:30.

I’ve been sick quite a bit in the past month, and I wouldn’t say that it’s been a serious sickness. I’ve just been tired and haven’t felt 100 percent. This week, however, just when I wanted to really kick in my running to get ready for this 15K trail run, my body decided to rebel. I’ve had a temperature as high as 101 degrees, and I can’t seem to shake it. Of course, some antibiotics would probably help, but I don’t like to take medicine. Apparently, I’d rather wallow in my own illness than do something about it. How theological is that?

Along with not being able to run tonight, like I wanted to, I also wanted to go to Hartford City to see some bands—The Whipstitch Sallies and So What and the Deliverance—perform and to spend time with some friends. I have been planning to go hear them for several weeks, if not months, so I was really disappointed to not be able to go. But I decided that I am old enough to have to cancel some things when I am sick, which is kind of a big deal for me, because I tend to just keep going until I drop over. In fact, that’s likely why I am sick right now. Last weekend was a doozy, and since the end of February, I have been going nonstop. I’ve been going so nonstop, I was shocked when I looked at the calendar today and realized that April is literally a week away. I’ve missed March somehow. Time generally goes too fast for me anyway, but this was ridiculous.

Somehow I also missed the fact that the Huffington Post Religion section is running a special page for Lent 2012. Do they do this every Lent and I’m just oblivious? Probably.

Each day there is a meditation provided by one person from a diverse group of religious leaders and writers. Some of them are very moving, so I would suggest simply going there and perusing them if you’re so inclined. This one by Rev. Emily C. Heath was one of my particular favorites, and this one by Carol Howard Merritt is a particularly beautiful story of the grace of feet washing, to which I can thank my Church of God friends for introducing me. Enjoy the contemplation.

Peace.

Lent Day 28 & 29: All My Stuff, Imago Dei, and the American Dream

I have a lot of stuff. As I write this, I am sitting in a not-so-comfortable chair, suffering God knows what kind of allergies, thinking about how blessed I am. Within my reach, without even moving from this chair, I have books about lots of topics (John Wesley’s Sermons; Living Buddha, Living Christ; Reluctant Pilgrim; The Death and Life of the Great American School System; Revelations; Paradise; The Ask and the Answer; Mockingjay; the Bible), magazines as varied (Runner’s World; Sojourner’s Magazine; The Writer’s Chronicle), and a graphic novel (Billy Fog and the Gift of Trouble Sight). I have an empty (previously full) glass of clean water and a belly full of delicious food. I have clean clothes, electricity, and too many gadgets. I have every tangible thing I could ever want (except for a brand new Nissan Z). I am blessed.

A line near the end of Billy Fog and the Gift of Trouble Sight says, “Don’t waste your time being mean. Just watch—the years go by in the blink of an eye… Be good to your parents, and work hard at school.” For as blessed as I am, and likely you are, I spend an awful lot of time dwelling on those things I don’t have. I could list a handful of things I’d like to go buy if I had the money to. Are any of those, things I need? Not likely. I have a coat for the winter. I have shoes. Lots of shoes. I have so many clothes I can’t wear them all in a week (or probably a month), and I have access to a a washer and dryer in my house, so there’s really no need for it. But I compare myself to the people around me and come up short every time. There is always something I could do better, purchase bigger, be rewarded for more lavishly. Isn’t this, after all, the American Dream? To get ahead?

Sometimes, because they want to get ahead, people are mean. They’ll stop at nothing to get ahead, and before they know it, their lives have passed them by and they’re left with a closet full of clothes, shelves full of books, and enough shoes to outfit the Harlem Globetrotters. I don’t want to be one of those people. I want to live my life with meaning, because it seems fairly simple to “be good to your parents, and work hard at school.” Being good seems fairly simple, but it’s not for me. Being a competitive jerk is much easier, getting caught up the capitalist snare of trying to do better than those people around me until I no longer recognize myself or the imago dei inside of me. I lose sight of God in me. I can’t recognize the divine in myself, but I can see that my friends’ shoes are cooler than mine, that I don’t have the latest fashions, or that I need one more book. That’s the big one for me: books.

“Don’t waste your time being mean.” Instead, use your time to rediscover the image of God inside you, hiding there beneath all the layers of excess that have built up around you. Shed the American dream for the imago dei.

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On a personal note, I’ve been in an athletic slump for about three weeks. I haven’t run in at least as long, and I have a 9 mile race in two weeks. I doubt that’s going to happen, and I seriously doubt the 13.1 miles that are supposed to happen in May are going to happen. Some prayers would be appreciated on the exercise front. In order to help hold myself accountable, I signed up for this College Swim Trip from March 26 to April 27. During that month, I am supposed to swim a total of 57 miles, the distance from Ball State to Butler. My goal is to run 2 miles and swim 2 miles each morning. That’s an hour of swimming and a half hour of running, which isn’t really too much to ask, right? I’m really not sure why I’ve been in such a funk. Here’s to healthy eating, healthy exercise, and to mental and spiritual health.

Peace.