Friday, September 18, 2015

Things I Learned This Week: Greyhound Edition

  • Greyhound: viable mode of transportation if you're going a medium distance and need to get work done on the way, even if it smells like a portapotty. 
  • I did, in fact, learn stuff in year one of Ph.D. studies. I was skeptical of this in May, but somehow being back in class for year two, feel like I know all kinds of stuff.
  • Roommate babies are the best babies.

  • A side of hummus at my favorite Mediterranean place is as much in quantity as a tub from the grocery store and less in cost. Game over, snack attacks.

Tuesday, September 8, 2015

First day of school!


Year two. Got this biz on lockdown.

Also, this is the part where I start writing about academia as promised in the sidebar.

Happy birthday!

Today is the Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary. In plain English, it's Mary's birthday.

Lots of Catholics have a soft spot for Mary, and lots of Catholic converts and reverts had a soft spot for her well before they came into the Church. I'm one of those. She has had her gentle guiding hand on my back all my life.



Photos: The Church of St. Ann in Jerusalem, purported to be the site of Mary's birth. January 2010.

Friday, September 4, 2015

Things I Learned This Week: Transparent Brained Fish Edition


Whut nature stop ur showing off
  • This thing is a real animal. It's called a barreleye fish, and it's head is in fact transparent. The green blobs are its eyes, which are turned 90 degreed upwards to watch for the silhouettes of its prey in the blackness of the deep ocean. Look upon the Lord's creation, ye mortals, and tremble. 
  • Farmer's market produce doesn't magically last forever. This should not be something I just learned this week.
  • If you're getting back on the coffee train after being off it for a while, start slow. Do not jump right back into full mugs of heavy diesel cold press. Your heart will have things to say to you. 

Tuesday, September 1, 2015

On the Strange Heartbreak of Joy



I tell you this to break your heart,
    by which i mean only
that it break open and never close again
    to the rest of the world.
- Mary Oliver
Once in while, I've felt my heart pressed with greater joy than I knew it could handle. It's always a quite realization. I marvel once I notice, and I gradually comprehend that it's no temporary jolt but a new abiding way of being. Whatever space in me receives joy has expanded.

Joy is a way of understanding reality. Each time my feeble little heart and brain grasp a new grain of Truth, it grows my heart, and since nature abhors a vacuum, the new space fills with wonder at that Truth, which is to say, it fills with joy. Since the Truth abides forever, so does joy.

The only way to make that new space is to break apart the old one. Each time I've felt that press of joy, it's been in the wake some realization or experience that forces me to let go of some old understanding*. This kind of letting go always feels like a death, albeit a teeny one, but in the equally teeny scheme of my life, persisting through some of those experiences feels like a hell of a trial. I feel my heart twinge in my chest - literally, physically - and I wish it weren't so even as some other part of me sees joy coming.

God breaks my heart all the time, over and over. It feels like He's wringing me out. In my better moments I understand that feeling is just me twisting away from Him, and I understand that the breaking I feel is joy clearing out things that weren't part of me to begin with. And clearing out those things is a kind of death, is a kind of heartbreak, is the only way my scaly heart can make room for joy.

Like rings on a tree trunk, each time this happens, joy grows exponentially. Each heartbreak lets more of the world, more of Christ, seep in. And each time, I am bigger, stronger, with more to give and more space to receive.


*These aren't even sad things, necessarily. A great example is my time in Brownsville. I have nothing but positive things to say about those two years and those ten people, and also it was the hardest, most uncomfortable thing I'd ever done.