Coming Out Of The Dark

Hello. I haven't posted on here in months. There are a few different reasons for that.

One is that I have been questioning my religious identity lately and I wasn't sure if I should continue to speak as an LDS Vegan if I am no longer fully representative of the LDS church.

Another is that I have been facing a lot of personal, emotional, and relational challenges which I will choose to call opportunities to grow.

Another is that I have not been cooking any new and exciting things, even though I have recently been to some great Vegan-friendly restaurants.

To be honest, I suppose you could say I've been depressed. And being depressed often makes it difficult to feel like doing anything that involves facing one's own imperfections. This weekend I fully intended to set aside time to allow myself to be sad and angry about life. But before I had even started, my weekend got good. Not only good, it got great, and this culminated in a sermon at the Bellingham Unitarian Fellowship which cracked my heart open and started pouring healing onto it. So I thought I should share a bit of this moment of clarity with anyone who is reading this.

Bear with me, because while this post is about pacifism (something which goes hand in hand with veganism in my opinion), it is also about peace within ourselves.

Today was Armistice Day and Veteran's Day. Armistice Day commemorates the day on which World War I was ended at 11:11 (yes, on 11/11). Apparently in the years between WWI and WWII, every November 11th at 11:11 people would stop, even streetcars would stop halfway up a hill, and observe two minutes of silence, one for the dead of the war, and one for those who were left behind... the mothers and children and friends.

So the choir sang Prayer of the Children, which has been one of my favorite songs since my earliest memories, and I couldn't help but cry, it was so beautiful and sad.
The sermon was about the ugliness of war, and how we learn lessons from history so, so slowly, but that we need to keep trying to be vocal against violence, to remind people of the lessons of history, and try to remember them even when we're afraid, hurt, or angry. It was really powerful... a tribute to pacifism that was not at all heavy-handed, but simply telling the emotional truth of war, the toll it takes, and indirectly asking if it is ever worth it.


Now you might wonder why this made my weekend so great, when it's such a depressing topic. Well, the rest of my day did involve a lot of more cheerful things, like playing a game impromptu over the phone with my sister, and laughing more than I ever expected just from the sheer joy of talking to a friend. But it was the mix of the feelings that made the day wonderful, actually. I watched a TED talk on vulnerability which you can listen to here. The most important thing I took away from it is that we as humans are wired for love and connection, and vulnerability is essential to that, even though it is also the source of anxiety, shame, and pain. We try to avoid the hard feelings by numbing ourselves. But we can't selectively numb ourselves. If we numb one emotion our capacity to feel others will inevitably be lessened, and that leads to the misery we're trying to avoid by numbing ourselves... it's a vicious cycle. So. If I need to, I will still let myself feel sad or angry this coming week. But, I will try to let myself feel happy too. Here is what I have learned.

I need to work on embracing the heartbreakingly beautiful thing that is life lived wholeheartedly. It is painful, but it is also good, even if I'm scared to death of not getting what I really want or of letting people down. I realized this weekend that a lot of the anger I've been feeling is at myself, because I had in my heart committed to doing whatever it took to be there for someone who is very important to me, but then that commitment crumbled under my own needs and weakness. Or "selfishness" as I sometimes chose to call it. The realization that maybe I just can't be everything I want to be in a given moment was really earth shattering. It made me feel extremely inadequate. It made me feel like my worth as a friend was below zero. It wasn't anything anyone else did. It was all me and my own horror at the fact that I wanted something I thought was selfish to want.

But in hurting myself for wanting things, I make myself angry, and that anger gets displaced onto the people around me.

It is strange to have this feeling of clarity after weeks of muddling around in the dark. Even while I'm feeling clear, the fear is still there. The sadness. Yes, I have lost some things that are important to me, some chances, some threads of my life may not be picked back up or woven in the way I dreamed they would. And that is sad and it always will be. But I am so, so lucky. And I am okay. It is okay for me to be who I am, even if that means being sad and hurting. And I'm crying now but that's okay too, because hurting is okay. It's a good part of life. It's a teacher.

I recently watched a poetic video which really moved me because it is so relevant to this stage in my life. It's about being alone.

You can watch it here: http://youtu.be/k7X7sZzSXYs

I guess my life is a little bit like history. I go to war with myself so many times, I hurt myself emotionally because I am afraid of what the different sides of me are doing, I'm afraid of parts of myself being destroyed by other parts, and I learn lessons which I forget over and over but can only hope will be engraved into my heart a little deeper at the end of every conflict and before the next one. And just like the world I don't know if I will ever be permanently at peace or cease violence against myself on all levels, but I can set it as a goal and move towards it, and hope, and hope, and hope.

And enjoy whatever peace comes in between the conflicts, and fall in love with that peace, but bear the burden of pain and vulnerability more courageously with each emotional falling out with myself. I can try to learn to love and accept my imperfections as part of the learning process, as part of being alive and being a human capable of deep transformation.

I caught on to a feeling of freedom today, and for once I was able to acknowledge that in some ways my focus needed to be changed. I haven't had much perspective in the last few months as to my own personal purpose in life. Although actually, home is still on my mind... the creation of or return to a home, the home, the homes. And I suppose I took that as my purpose. As the TED speaker says, that's what we're here for, connection... neurologically, biologically, we are wired that way, and of course I believe spiritually as well. And I still believe that I am meant to be loved deeply and to love others deeply and create a sense of home. I just don't know who that will be with or when or where or how. And it is okay.

I may still have days when I get desperate for family. When I'm so homesick that I feel like I can't face another day on my own. When I want so badly to feel connected that I am willing to discard every scrap of individual opinion or feeling that is holding me back from that goal. And that's okay too. Those feelings are valid and are good because it means that I am alive and letting myself feel things, letting emotions drive home to me what is most important even if I can't have it all now. I can rejoice in the beauty of those longings, in the fact that I am literally made to love and be loved, and eventually I will learn more and more how to do that better, and I can find bits and pieces of happiness along the way, pieces that shine in my pockets like the falling stars saved for a rainy day in the song my mom used to sing.

Right now they are glowing like nightlights in my fists, like sparks of bioluminescence in the ocean at long beach, like the firelight behind our heads and the moonlight as we looked for shooting stars early in the morning before the sunrise. They are glowing like the chalices at BUF, the candles on the table in the back lit for sorrows and joys of unnamed congregants. They are glowing like magical stones, the hearts of mythical beasts, the eyes of jack-o-lanterns and christmas lights and candles on a birthday cake when everyone is around you. They are glowing like quiet sunsets and fireworks and the windows of lodges at Holden Village. Like sunlight on the backs of dragonflies, and the reflection of light hiding periwinkles in the river, like the brightest of the golden leaves before the first snow. Like Las Vegas hiding behind the horizon, like Jupiter at the end of the telescope, and like the jeweled green of new leaves on Easter morning.

Life is good even when it hurts, and like The Doctor said, the bad things don't necessarily outweigh the good things or make them unimportant. Even when life is literally too painful for some people to take, that doesn't mean it wasn't worth living, and that they weren't worth their own time in life. It doesn't mean the world was any less beautiful for their pain or their confusion or loss or sorrow.

So it is okay for me to feel these things. It is okay for me to be beautifully sad and fearfully joyful. It is even okay for me to feel ugly and angry and dark once in a while. I can come out of it and still feel the shining of things if I pay enough attention. If I don't numb myself too much to escape from life.

And yes, right now I do believe in God with my whole heart, because my heart is singing out to Him, whatever or wherever he is. I feel that the beauty of life in every tiny moment is something that, whether incidental or intentional, is so perfectly designed like a song, like music, the notes happen and each is brought into being individually even as they are part of something whole and alive which lives and dies, swells and subsides. And this feeling of awe and inspiration is too closely linked to my religious life to probably ever extricate or separate, although I know that I can't predict the future even in things I feel are certain never to change. Still, regardless of what it is connected to, I want to embrace it wholeheartedly as I used to more often in the past, and let it change me, open my eyes and heart to living from the heart. Really that is where we all live whether we admit it to ourselves or not. If we can make peace with our own hearts and love them for what they are, life becomes so much more meaningful in the small things.

And I had no idea I had this much to say on this subject, but the flow of words picked me up and it feels like I'm being spoken through, like the me that is present in my mind lately, the angry and shallow me I dislike, has fallen silent and stepped aside to allow something powerful and beautiful and pure to pour out like water from a rock. And although I sometimes wonder whether we should trust this spontaneously joyful and loving part of myself, since its desires have sometimes seemed to cause pain and turmoil... I don't think that changes the fact that the heart itself of that phenomenon is good and should not be starved or beaten into submission. It is beautiful. It is so beautiful, the purest core of that feeling.

And it makes me like myself a lot more, because of the chance that maybe, just maybe, THIS is the real me, and everything that I hate is the surface me, the shell with which I try to guard myself from the world. I know that when I talk to people I really love about things that are hurting them, when I get into that mode of having really deep empathetic conversation, I feel that the cores of those people I love are like this thing that is moving in me now. I don't know what to call it without sounding cheesy or trite. But it's the real reason life is worth living, and I can never get away from that. I don't want to. Why would I?