I walked into a church service on a Sunday morning for the first time in many years today and it was exceptional in many ways.

It was exceptionally difficult.
It was exceptional emotional.
It was exceptionally relaxed.
It was exceptionally good.
It was exceptionally raw.
It was exceptionally personal.
It was exceptionally genuine.

I greatly appreciated the message brought by Swiss Army Pastor Brian Thiessen (get it? Like the knife) which focused on forgiveness…knowing what it is, knowing why it is, and knowing why we need it and why we need to give it – to ourselves and others.

The music set the stage and the fact that I could walk in, sit down and worship in my quiet way was very appreciated. The only expectation I felt was to be who I was. This is a rare thing.

The venue (Morden’s Kenmor Theatre) is perfect for a gathering at 10:30 am on a Sunday morning. The people there cut across demographics and social boundaries and were all joined by that single common element – our mutual humanity.

It cannot be an easy thing for a person and his family to put themselves out there and start a gathering place in a region that has more than 50 established, brick and mortar churches. Even scarier to do it without the structure of a denomination or a not-for-profit status behind you. Frightening and faith-filled with no passing of a plate (or even a donation box in view that I could see).

A visible demonstration of faith and courage by a family that I needed to see.

I can say this – I walked in feeling fear and I walked out feeling refreshed.

It feels like something good…

the rain is laid out gentle
like gossamer Persephone before dry Hades,
this pale waif wet with mother’s tears
soon to vanish from the earth as mist
leaving nothing quenched,
leaving nothing at all
save for her fragrance
that hangs on the air
like the ghost of spring
and the promise of life renewed
after the passing of hell

i am to die
each and every day
and yet
in this
i fail
and find myself
alive
at the sun’s going down
remaining undead
yearning for the courage
to give over
and truly live

with the inevitable setting
of a redder, larger sun,
the shadows melt together
and the two become one –

indistinguishable from the surrounding dark

Increasingly I get more and more worried about everything and everyone close to me.

It never used to be this way.

I never really worried about anything or anyone, least of all myself. Now the list of worries continue to rise like an unstoppable tide within me.

With worry comes anxiety.

I HATE anxiety more than any other emotion…I desperately and forcefully despise it with all of my being. I find it immobilizing and I do not like being paralyzed. It is like a tumor in the back of the throat that will not go away.

I worry about my daughter walking to a friend’s house alone. I worry about my children crossing the highway. I worry about my son now that he lives on his own. I worry that the cat is going to get the lizard. I worry that the robin nesting over the front door is going to get frightened away so often her eggs won’t hatch. I worry about people not wearing bike helmets. I worry about not being strong enough. I worry about failing. I worry about succeeding. I worry about my inability to be emotionally expressive in a genuine fashion. I worry.

It never used to be this way.

Soren Kierkegaard wrote in his great work The Concept of Anxiety the following:

“Anxiety may be compared with dizziness. He whose eye happens to look down the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his own eye as in the abyss, for suppose he had not looked down. Hence, anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, which emerges when the spirit wants to posit the synthesis and freedom looks down into its own possibility, laying hold of finiteness to support itself. Freedom succumbs to dizziness. Further than this, psychology cannot and will not go. In that very moment everything is changed, and freedom, when it again rises, sees that it is guilty. Between these two moments lies the leap, which no science has explained and which no science can explain. He who becomes guilty in anxiety becomes as ambiguously guilty as it is possible to become. Anxiety can just as well express itself by muteness as by a scream.”

Trapped in a thought-loop tightrope that engages with the possibility of every possibility…

The solution seems to be to simply disengage. I am not fond of that option. To reach out for the emotion switch and flip it off and become Android Peter – effective at navigating life and approximating a human being but, if you look closely, not quite.

There is a small voice that whispers almost unnoticed in my mind – “release…” over and over again…and I resist for no good reason…but it remains persistent and with this persistence there is hope.

(For mum on the eve of Mother’s Day and every other lovin’ mother out there…)

mum loves
because
sometimes
that’s all mum can do
to save her world,
to save her own

mum loves
to keep the hate away,
to keep the dark at bay –
sometimes;
mum loves to breathe,
and mum loves to live
and not to drown in it all

mum loves
when love is all
that keeps death down;
mum loves in fierce
and cutting ways;
she loves
to keep the light around

mum loves

 

beyond light gossamer threads
left by spiders escaping to the four corners
minds hide from the truth
that all things fall
like leaves to the burdened earth

and what will be will be
but for a momentary weightlessness

my roots…
my roots are covered in a richer shit
and soaked with the stuff of life;
my soil is torn blood-rock and trash
through which only a hardier variety thrives,
the place where the crow pecks and scratches
where one learns to speak with a thousand voices,
to look with a thousand eyes.

I belong to the hot summer pavement
and the dry cracked earth
filled with nettle and weed;
this…this is my yellow sun,
this is where I grow strong,
this place is where I belong.