The sun is always shining

Life was hard the past few months.  Maybe not hard, but dark.  Ok, that still sounds a little melodramatic for what it really was.  Let’s say it was dimly lit.  I moved to a new place, old roommates moved away, a lot of uncertainties about career path, friendships, current job security, finances, relationships.  I was really in a funk.  Or maybe a mild state of depression.  Either way, life was lacking luster.  Sometimes I wondered why I couldn’t seem to pull myself out of it.  I thought about those people out there, somewhere (I think I saw them on Oprah), who wake up everyday and “choose happiness”.  You know the ones, the bright-eyed bushy-tailed folks who say they make a conscious choice everyday before they get out of bed (and probably step into white fluffy slippers) to be grateful and make this ‘the best day ever!’  These are also the ones you’ll hear touting the tried and true cliche “When life hands you lemons, you make lemonade!”.  Well to be quite honest, too much lemonade makes my stomach sick.  

I just do not buy into the idea that we can choose joy each and every day and in doing so that we can avoid the hurts and suffering that is life.  Those people who put on a smile every day as part of their morning routine (sometimes forcedly), well I just wonder how hard the fall will be when they finally crumble and enter back into the reality that most of us are living in each and every day.   Not to say that all reality is misery.  But I have come to a place where I believe, for our own mental health, we must enter into suffering that comes our way.  We must feel the emotions that our bodies conjure up rather than stuff them in a box and ship them away deep into the do-not-enter places in our soul.  

But I think maybe I have gotten into a place where I have allowed myself a bit too much grace in that direction.  Maybe I have allowed myself to sit in the pit for too long, beginning a habit of looking at the glass as half empty.  I must find a way to remember that even in the midst of pain, even in the darkness, the funk, there is indeed a joy or a hope for something better which motivates a change of spirit or growth.  We must not allow ourselves to suffer for suffering’s sake itself.  We should embrace and take solace in the pain as means to an end.  A better end.

The other day I was flying out of Atlanta to head back home to Chicago.  It was January 2nd and, if the weather acts as any sort of indicator of the New Year, 2009 was looking pretty bleak.  Cold, rainy and clouds as far as the eye could see (and these weren’t big-puffy-happy clouds, these were I’m-going-to-make-your-life-miserable-today clouds).  Not a single ray of sunshine to be seen.  My flight was delayed.  Two days prior I thought I had a good feeling about this new year, but things were looking the contrary if you buy into foreshadowing signs via Mother Nature.

A couple hours later, I was finally settled on the plane in my seat next to the window. (I’ll admit, I am a window snob traveler. I must sit next to the window, leave the shade pulled up for my viewing pleasure and feel free to lean as close to the window as I like to get a good view of the tiny world below.  If the other non-window seat passengers want to see out the window, they should have preferenced a window seat in their travel plans.)  

As we rumbled into ascension, the clouds quickly overtook my view of the ground, resolving into what felt like a sea of dirty white endlessness.  I kept looking out the window, hoping for a glimpse of the intricate maze of interstate ramps or perfectly geometric plots of land below and that feeling of wonder at how tiny it all looked that makes air travel so wonderfully Alice In Wonderland-like.  But no, the clouds were too thick and I was forced to acquiesce.  As I leaned back into my seat,  all of a sudden, a burst of color took me by surprise.  Out of the window I watched as we broke through the darkness and now were sailing above a sea of white shining in the sun’s glow against the perfectly pitched blue sky.  It was like an awakening!  The sun was still shining, bright as ever, beyond the clouds.  It had never missed a beat, it was always shining.  The sun is ALWAYS shining.  It hit me with such sheer clarity.  

 The sun is always shining.  Yes, the clouds, the storms, the wind and rain come.  And it must.  But even when we are miserable, even when we can’t see it or feel it or even see signs of it, we must remember that the sun is always shining above it all.  And as we hold out for it patiently, anxiously, it will soon return and restore us to light again.

We Are Not Our Clothes!

Ok so I’ve been all-consumed with this idea that WE ARE NOT OUR CLOTHES!  It started over a year ago when I was living and working in North Lawndale, a low-income neighborhood on the West Side of Chicago.  I was on this angry kick of thinking about materialism and possessions and our society’s obsession with such.  And I began to wonder why certain pieces of our clothing mean so much to many of us, and why it would be so devastating if those pieces were to be stolen or taken from us.  It struck me how undoubtedly we place aspects of ourselves in our material possessions, though all they are are things, separate from our person and  humanly-expressed being or soul.  But yet, in our society, for most, these things make up a piece or more of who we are, somehow influencing, enhancing or even creating our own perceptions of ourselves and others.  Though, yes, this may seem a common understanding and point of frustration for many circles and schools of thought, especially those more-liberal-less-conventional-anti-capitalism-folks, I do not think it is critically assessed in popular society nearly enough.  Especially since popular culture seems most confined or subscribed to this societal construct without much thought….

Then I brought it back to my neighborhood, North Lawndale.  With more than 75% of North Lawndale residents living below the national poverty line, I wondered how many of my neighbors actually have the resources to pick and choose their clothing and accessories in order to ‘create’ the persona or self-identity they so desire to portray?  How many just wear whatever is passed down or given to them or affordable within their means and must fore-go the assumed right to ‘choice’ of style and self-expression the more affluent feel they deserve?  If so, what does this mean for THEIR personal identity and self-expression?  How do they view fashion as a function in their everyday world?  These questions really got my head spinning….

More than a year later, I can’t stop thinking about this.  I know, as a young female living in one of the largest metropolitan cities in the US, fashion is something you need to pay attention to.  Or at least I have been conditioned to believe that.  But what is fashion? Where did it come from?  Technically one could subscribe to Genesis as the biography for humankind’s first fashion designers, Adam and Eve, who began the idea of ‘clothing’ through the means of fig leaves in order to cover themselves.  So if that was the beginning, how did clothing evolve from simple material used to cover our privates into this consuming always-changing-thus-material-wasting-money-making-status-marking-self-expression-machine?  In the beginning, clothing and fashion was at the mercy of the needs of humankind.  Now, for the majority, it appears that humankind is at the mercy of fashion.  At least if they care at all about status, appearance, making a good impression and keeping up with culture.

So I have decided to act on these long-burning curiosities and try to research this in a multi-faceted way.  As a social experiment, I want to produce a documentary (of which I have no experience doing nor knowledge on how to do it) that will assess several aspects of this over-arching theme of We Are Not Our Clothes!   I envision 3 main segments: the social experiment, a variety of interviews from folks from all different backgrounds and a brief historical analysis of the evolution of clothing/fashion and it’s function in society.

Just to even begin thinking about putting flesh onto this idea is absolutely terrifying.  I am one of those people who has a lot of ideas but will only complete about 0.5% of them because of my desire to do things perfectly (or fear of failure) which leads to my lack of follow-through.  So here is my official commitment to this project.  I am now seeking a creative team to help keep me to this commitment and brainstorm life into this idea….anyone interested, please let me know!  A videographer is highly anticipated!

 More details on this specific vision for this documentary/social experiment will follow soon.

Life After

I was catapulted from my year of volunteering into real life.  I have come to see that during the course of my year, I was living in a mystical duality.  Life was slow, slow enough to sit for family dinners and spend time with my neighbors on a weekly basis and chat with people on my walk to work.  But life was fast, filled constantly with experiences and discussions and prayers and thoughts that stretched me and kept me from laziness and selfishness.  Life was full enough that what I may have normally experienced in several years going at society’s self-focused pace, I experienced in one ridiculously structured and others-minded year.  And yet I was happy.  No, not happy.  Filled with joy.

Now that I’m done with my ‘year’ and moved onto real life, I’ve not been able to find my barings.  To find in everyday life the pace which is realistic and the peace that is necessary is a very difficult thing to do alone.  Find.  This is the word, the concept that is haunting me, HAS haunted me.  Will I find—find a sense of balance, a calling, an understanding…will I one day have a moment of epiphany after I’ve read and digested just the right mix of philosophy and theology and autobiographical memoirs that lead to my personal understanding of how a life is to be lived well?   Must I create this sense of balance?  Or…. can I receive it?  We look and look and look.  And seek and search some more.

I have come to believe that this seeking is the finding.  That the journey, the honest search, with divine guidance, is where the important things of life will slowly  settle into their resting places as the other not-so-important things get shuffled out.  Though the scale of balance sometimes leans or falls, it will always comes back to center with an earnest heart and genuine reverence for life’s truths.

The waters have grown…

“Come gather round people wherever you roam, And admit that the waters around you have grown, And accept it that soon you’ll be drenched to the bone, If your time to you is worth saving, And you better stop swimming or you’ll sink like a stone, Oh the times they are a-changing” ~Bob Dylan

I had the amazing gift of spending the whole month of August relaxing, resting, and visiting long-missed friends and family after my Mission Year in Chicago.  And in the few and far spaces between, I attempted to piece back together my life in ‘the real world’ with this big, wonderful, dirty mess of the last year of my life staring me in the face.  And when I looked back at it, I realized how profoundly my perspective—the way I think, act, respond, judge— has changed (or is in the process of changing) in just one year. My world, the water in which I swim, has grown larger and choppier than I feel I can handle at times. I have come to see so much hurt and unfairness that I don’t really know what to do with it. I wonder often, has there always been this much hurt in the world or have times really changed that much? Jesus did say it himself, “The poor will always be among us.” I’ve found myself wondering, “Is it really worth it to try to change anything? Can we really bring about POSITIVE change?”

When I get into these moods, when I see the world as a glass that is barely half empty, I tend to see everything extremely large and looming. SOCIAL INJUSTICE. RACISM. CLASSISM. POVERTY. HUNGER. VIOLENCE. CORRUPTION. HATRED. INDIFFERENCE. How on Earth can we begin to create Heaven on Earth as Jesus taught us to pray for in the Lord’s Prayer when we are up against these giants?

A week or so ago I got caught up in one of these moments and just broke down. I began crying, thinking of it all. Where is God? Where is this Good God that I want to hold fast to in all this? As I settled down a bit, I took a moment and spoke to God, telling him that I would give Him the next five minutes. I would meditate on Him and in that time I asked that He give me some sort of reprieve, some sort of sign that everything is OK, He is there and is working it out to make the world a better place like He’s supposed to (I don’t know how doctrinally or theologically sound this is, but hey, I gotta be real with Him). I was so serious I even set a timer. Within the first 30 seconds, I was balling. It escalated and utterly uncontrollable sobs racked my body for the next 5 minutes. Then DING, the timer went off. “What? That’s it?” I thought. No God, no Good God would leave me hanging like that! I felt frustrated, abandoned. And then it hit me. That is how God feels. He is crying out there, balling, heart-broken and wrecked at the thought of us down here suffering, hurting, dying, hating. I know it. In that moment I realized the very act of crying out for the woes of this world was just a glimpse, a small moment of divine intimacy with God above. He was revealing to me His heart for the hurting.

I am realizing, yes, as long as I continue to follow the path Jesus has called us to, these waters of injustice will continue to be large and the waves will keep coming, but I want to stay in this place of struggle as long as I need to, to continue to know God’s heart. I will try not to fight it, try not to swim against it to retreat to the comfortable place away from the pain, but I hope that along the way He will give me the strength and guidance to work towards change. And that, while I am drenched to the bone in this struggle, Hope will come. Let us all pray that Hope will come.

A lesson from Cook County Jail

Every month the counseling agency I volunteer for goes to the Cook County Jail, one of the toughest prisons in the country,  to facilitate workshops for female inmates who are nearing their “out-date”. These workshops based on the “Within My Reach” curriculum provide insight, tools and a space to dialog about what healthy relationships look like, the importance of them in our lives, and how to obtain and maintain them. For one week a month, about 25-40 women inmates gather together for two hours to be a part of this training.

I was given the opportunity to help facilitate a couple sessions and, of course, all my pre-conceived notions of what going into a roomful of inmates would be like were completely shattered.  Silly me.  The women came from all different backgrounds and were insightful, genuine, caring individuals who welcomed us with open arms and shared their hearts with us and one another.  

At the end of the workshop, each participant is asked to fill out a booklet, which is a series of questions with fill-in-the bubble responses.  The booklet asks for background information like age, race, level of education, personal income, etc.  Part of my job as a volunteer this year has been to take the data from the participants’ booklets and input it into the online data system. However mundane this task may seem, I can tell you that it has been one of the most eye-opening tasks during the course of my year.

Through this process, I have seen the statistics that stack up against many of the women that we serve in these workshops at the prison. The numbers don’t lie.  But the more I see the patterns, I wish the numbers WOULD lie.  I wish I could erase the circle that over half of these women bubbled in stating that the highest level of education they’ve completed is the 8th grade. I am tempted more and more each time to ignore the question asking about race, believing that maybe if I deny the truth in the numbers that show over 75% of these women are African American, JUST MAYBE the negative stereo-type will decline and the chance that these women will return back in the prison system will as well. And I hope to God that the over 75% of participants who marked that their current income is under $5,000 a year (many with multiple children in their home) are accounting for their income WHILE IN JAIL and not there income before they were imprisoned.

But it goes to show that there are interconnected factors, the pattern of the lower-educated women being African American, the pattern of single mothers with many children making little to no money, the high levels of drug-use coinciding with confessions of guilt about their drug habit. All these factors are correlated in a great big giant mess.

I cannot even begin to elaborate the level of guilt I have felt this year in realizing what great advantages I have had in my life because of being a white female from a middle-class nuclear family. It has been paralyzing in many ways, disheartening and really earth-shattering in my understanding of the many circumstances and choices that many of  these women have to deal with and they factor into their path to jail.   Circumstances that I was fortunate enough to never have to face in my sheltered little life.  It has been a very humbling experience to say the least. I’m hoping to find some reconciliation at some point, but though it is hard, I am overwhelmingly grateful for the journey I have begun.