A Good Day Is (a poem)

A good day is
one where I don’t remember
[dad yelling]
and everything I never finished

just
to make
him mad.

A good day is

one where I don’t remember

everything that I

lost,
gave up,
was too afraid to try.
or simply
fell
down
doing.

A good day is
accepting Plan B is the plan.
Forgetting the things that need forgetting.
Remembering too.

A good day is.

——————————————————————

Thanks for a great week ya’ll. I’m trying something new, no technology on the weekend. (We’ll see how I do.)

Peace,

Melody

Stopping Time (a poem about friendship)

With some friends,
you take down the words, moments
are scribbled onto your heart.

For their life
is a book of wisdom.

Leaning
forward, keening
for a moment of clarity
and goodness, even
as if you are sitting together in a holy place.

Sacred space

is created
in the meeting of spirits, souls
mystically blended,
time stops
with some friends.

My Duct Taped Heart (a poem)

I’m awake early, even before my alarm.
Lieing in bed listening
to the rolling thunder, wondering to myself.

I know a rain spout is loose,
it was duck taped on.
It worked for a season but even that

finally came loose and free.
I don’t know how to fix things.
I wonder about my father and why he never taught me

how? Now he’s gone.
I can’t ask him that and many other questions.
So I wonder,

Lieing in bed
listening to the thunder and knowing the rain pours down.
There are so many things I want to fix.

I was raised to think I can’t.
For now, I will lie here
and wonder.

What’s changing, so that I can be writing!

This is such a busy time for folks with kids. We are living the last month or so of school and for whatever reason my kids seem to teeter on the brink of things this year academically, spiritually, emotionally — this has been a challenging and demanding year. With summer looming, there will be any opportunities to stick our feet in the river and less time to write.

I am thinking about that tension.

I’m starting to work more seriously on writing projects. As I listened hard at the Festival of Faith & Writing and looked at my writing life and habits, I realize that I need to cut back on some things before I can ever dream of space to write every day. (I know I have a lot to tell you about that experience, the festival. We’ve been back a week and there’s been no time!)

Projects that I’m working on:

I am working on a book review of the book Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer for The Englewood Review of Books and hope to do more of those, both for Englewood and other publications.

I continue to write for Provoketive magazine: This included a review of the book Resignation of Eve by Jim Henderson, a piece titled The Accidental Stay-At-Home Mom and others, but by far the most popular essay was The Voice of the Feminine. That content is not repeated here on my blog so you will have to pop over to there to read it. I hope you will.

I am working on a short series of articles on “The F word and the Church.” (Yeah, that F word: feminist.)

I am really excited to hear that I will have some poem in a book about fear titled Not Afraid to be published around August, 2012 by Civitas Press. (This is the same press that published my essay on Depression in their book Not Alone which is available now. If you know someone who suffers from depression this book may help. I have been told by many people that it has been a good, honest resource. I also have many pieces on my blog about my personal trials with the black dog of depression. They are collected here. )

What I want to change:

One thing that I find to be soul crushing and destructive for me is Facebook. Being at-home with such great flexibility to my schedule I see that I allow many things to interfere with the “work” of writing and with spiritual growth. Facebook is such a time waster for me. I’m inherently curious, nosy kind of person and the fact that I can vicariously follow along other’s lives is bad for me. That’s where the soul crushing part comes in. It’s like high school insecurity all over again. So I’ve been tempted to quit completely.

But at the Festival of Faith & Writing I heard over and over that writers must have online presence and following. We have to nurture that and be able to “prove” our popularity to a publisher. But the flip side of that is that it is just not good for me!

If I don’t have time

to think,

to be,

to write and

to allow the Holy One to mold and move me (not really in that order.)

So I’m backing off of social media for a season — except here. I’m really going to try to do this moderately. When I got hooked on Farmville (of all things — proves I can get addicted to anything!) I had to quit cold turkey and I did. I don’t want to do that with Facebook because I don’t like being an all or nothing person. But I’m going to try to limit my time there. And set some writing goals for the next few months. I look forward to sharing those with you.

Another thing that I learned at the festival was that I need to hone the purpose of my blog. Mine has multiple messages and intents. I have been known to write about:

family (dysfunctional and otherwise.)
God and devotion, faith and (dis)belief
women in the church, feminism as a Christian’s option
various justice issues
my alcoholism and addictions
my church – Blackhawk Evangelical Church
poetry on all these topics
prose on all these topics

Is there anything in particular that you come here to read? Where do you see my passions and strengths converging in helpful ways? Would you add more of anything?

Grace & Peace. Melody

Resentments (a poem)

Sitting. Fingers frozen, tapping on my laptop with
birds really chirping!
A cacophony of praise to the Holy One.

The wonder of it.
Sun shining. Blessed,
I am conscious of my dirty heart. So often
resentful, feeling left out or uninvited

to the party.

(I’m starting to think Facebook isn’t good for my soul) and

He says to me:

Enough.
I want to be enough.
I Am.

Choosing. (A Poem about Change)

[Being wounded] came effortlessly,

like an comfortable sweater

she put it on easily, too often.

Frayed and worn,

pain became her fate.

[Being changed]is hard, and only

comes by choosing. An old woman or a toddling child,

each must take

a step. It’s faith in the making.

Being wounded or being changed

comes in the choosing.

The Offering. (A poem about our words being an offering)

I have always known that words have power
to disappoint and even threaten.
They so often offend and injure, colliding with others
perceptions

of me,
of themselves,
of life together in this messy place.

And words heal,
offered as a rich confession that brings one to the edge of truth
and back again to our plain old lives.
Sometimes it’s a sweet and holy thing,
words. The offering.

If I didn’t choose to put pen to paper, finger to keyboard?
What if, what then? If I didn’t fight to get
this very moment down through distractions, through issues and problems of my day.
What if I stopped fighting for these words?
Driving along, I feel that anxious gnawing in my stomach, again.
I am full of self-loathing, doubt and fear. I hate this weakness, but I am questioning every word put down,
wondering how and why.
Why try so hard?
But then I know.

I would write even if no one tells me I’m good.
Then it’s said to me: “you’re good” and I don’t believe. Or I wonder,
is this enough?
These thoughts, do they change
anything
anyone
for
the
better?
This not merely about purpose.
It’s not simply about being good or even great at this craft.

I don’t know why I write, except that I was made for this.
Each thought, scratched out on a piece of tattered envelope is an offering.
Each confession a piece of me. My flesh, my hopes, my mind
are all there on the page. I write.
This is what I was made to do.
And I will have to leave the rest up you.

———————————————

Something else I wrote on the negative power of our words, Hatred’s Sweet Kiss.

Family in Town (a poem about family, loss, addiction, and change)

Family in town and from out of town
sometimes means heavy remembering,
and just a little trying to forget though you are
no longer disappearing.

Into the bottle.

Family in town means many goings-on,
even when you’re sick and tired. It means
running out of money. It means trying hard to make everyone
happy. Trying hard to just be.

Happy.

Family in town
means someone drinking too much, and
everyone else acting like it’s not true.
Your triggers activated, but sticking to the
almost- four- years- sober- kind -of- truth.

Family in town means laughing, lots of gut busting laughter,
Eating too many desserts, and wondering if you’re
forgetting something important.

Family in town, you remember and forget.

People gone. People here.

You don’t get to choose
Family in town.

Choking

You choke on the words.
You hurt me.

Three simple words,
a confrontation that won’t come.
The fear-scab
comes off the child-grown-up-into-woman wound.
The mutilation, scarred over long enough
that you had actually forgotten.
Again.
Impossible.

You needed to forget.
Until
mother-sister-blood
family rips it off again.
Their indifference,
your insignificance,
that’s what you need to forget
their command
over you.

They are the only ones
Wielding the control, able to make
you choke on the words.
You hurt me.

They don’t read.
They don’t come.
They don’t care.

You choke on the words
You hurt me.

Good People (those that toil, so that others can create)

There are people,

good people who toil every day

at work they don’t love and some

days simply endure.

Why do these people, good people do that?

They’re partnered with a creative soul;

a dreamer, someone

who scribbles words one after another, collected into pages

of an idea that is yet to come;

that hears a different drum beat and dance;

who changes others’ trajectory through an image or a song;

who observes life for its beauty and complexity;

who follows an uncomfortable path into the unknown.

These people, good people do

their everyday work because they love a dreamer.

Here’s to the good people whose love’s labor

is a gift to us all.

For Tom and Carol and the other good people.

the middle years (a poem about aging and knowing that you don’t know…much of anything)

The middle years
of middle age come without fair warning.
Raising the young
who think they know everything.
And those of us solidly wedged into midlife know
with confidence, that we know next to nothing.

The middle years are half way to a certain death,
while breathing in a life we did not pick. For
life happens even as you make plans, dream dreams, and pray.

The middle years
when the body betrays,
the heart is crushed
by what actually happened,
not our plans.
The mind with every strong conviction
is suddenly even more
uncertain.
Oh, for the days of knowing everything!
But then going back there to certainty
would mean doing this
all over again.

Call Me Crazy, But I Talk to Jesus too (Thoughts on being a Christian Woman in the 21st Century)

Call me crazy, but I talk to Jesus too.
And so, I can say that I don’t need you to liberate me.
Jesus already did that.
No, I don’t need a church to say what I can and cannot do,
I’m already free.

Call me crazy but I don’t believe in a Jesus that oppresses you or me.
You see, I’ll repeat it in case you didn’t understand, we are already free.

Yes, I’m going there.
Call me crazy but I don’t worship a male God. Sexuality just cannot matter
to Yahweh — who is the creator of the universe – who formed the stars and galaxies, and all kinds of life.
I believe in a God who isn’t male or female, he is everything.
God is spirit.
God is breath.
God is here.
God is everywhere.
God is everything good.
God came before us and will be here after us.

That I am a woman is nothing to him.
And here’s something else I believe.

God doesn’t love you because you’re a man.
He sure doesn’t love you more than me.
For a long time I thought he might.
But then, crazy me I talked to Jesus too, and then. I read the Bible for myself. I learned
yes, God loves me
for I am made in his image and by that he doesn’t mean male.

Because Yahweh, our creator God, isn’t male or female.
Don’t you get it?
We are already liberated and free.
I even think, if Jesus returned today he might not come as a male, no not today. I’m just saying,
he might not. Why does that scare you?

But as the Son of God it’s true. Jesus came in human form, two thousand years ago
and

way

back

then,

even though Jesus came to liberate us all,
even though God allowed a woman the great honor of being the first witness to the Resurrection,
still, way back then …

Women had nothing.
Women were chattel.
Women were owned.
Women were property.

Call me crazy, but I am not that two-thousand-year-old-oppressed-and-dependent-kind-of-woman,
I’m free.
I just need to learn live like it.

If you look. If you really care to open the eyes of your soul and read the Bible, then you will see.

No, I don’t believe in a God who oppresses anyone, least of all me.
I talk to Jesus and he told me

I’m already free.

MHH

Inspired by and written as a part of the Synchroblog March theme, All About Eve. As a part of Women’s History month,

Women’s rights have been all over the news recently, from bills in Congress and state representative bodies to crass “jokes” by national broadcasters. The idea that women are or should be equal to men has become a polarizing topic of discussion on the national stage. So we thought Synchroblog might jump right in. Anything concerning women in general, women and the church, balancing women’s rights with religious freedoms, the differences between men and women … these are all good topics for blog posts. There is one caveat, we are asking that the Synchroblog be a voice of moderation and temperance. You may have strong beliefs on this subject and that is good. Giving voice those beliefs in a spirit of cooperation and bridge-building is also good. We would like these posts to step in that direction. Here are a couple of great examples of moderate writing on women’s issues to prime your writing … An Apology From Limbaugh, But The Damage Is Done by Denny Burke. And now…on the other side (critique of extreme complementarianism) by Roger E. Olsen