yesterday marked a year since my cranky little rosetaina went from being a living and breathing part of my life that i missed every moment i wasn't with her to an idea and a memory that i miss every moment i am not with her. more time has passed since she died than i spent with her while she was alive. i have spent more time with the bird sketches and trinkets i have created and gathered to remember her by than i did with this precious creature herself. yet even as she becomes less and less a physical reality and more and more a collection of memories, images, and sensations in my mind and my body the bigger the space in my heart for her seems to feel. she grows into a bigger and bigger part of my life, part of who i am becoming...even as our moments together become a smaller and smaller percentage of the live i have lived. she died without knowing any words, but she speaks into every part of my life. she never learned to walk, but she always seems to go with me. i understand her death ended her suffering but it started a pain in me that i am still at a loss to understand. a year later i can look back and see how much my life has changed for the better because of knowing her, even because of losing her...but in the moment, any given moment she comes to mind and heart, i find myself with a hole there that no amount of purpose or understanding will ever sufficiently fill. last night i realized i have tried to fill it with a lot of that, and a lot of other things too. someone very wise told me the day she died that hurt and sorrow carve out space in our hearts for greater love.
i believed her.
while i packed that hole in the year since with reasons and everything else i could find, i waited for that love to grow in.
it didn't.
and if anything it felt like the love i already had was leaking out through the space and for all the clutter i was stuffing into my heart, it was emptier than ever. but that beautiful spirit who braved it with me as i first waded through the new waters of this ocean of loss wasn't wrong. she just didn't tell me the whole truth. she couldn't have then. i wouldn't have been able to hear. but as i walked the spaces of my heart last night, examining on this anniversary how my life has continually remodeled them i found it for myself. the sorrow created the space, and love is definitely the only thing that can fill it - because it is the only thing that makes me miss her this way, that makes me glad i knew her, and glad she threw up down my shirt so many times, and glad she preferred my chest to any pillow, and happy to do everything with one arm because she was in the other, and that makes those few months seem like a lifetime. a really big crazy abandoned humiliating supernatural love is the only thing that fits the shape of her in my heart. but it was me who supposed to fill that new space with that greater love. and since she left that space the girl who wasn't afraid of anything and who had happily devoted her life to loving has been afraid of that kind of love. not only did that require me to go against my very nature, it invited the destruction and confusion that always accompanies fear.
no wonder i have been such a disaster this year.
yesterday was the anniversary of her death and the day that would have been her 3rd birthday is just days away. i can't think of a better way to celebrate her life than to do something with all this revelation.
so now, like almost always...the answer to all my problems comes down to rejecting fear and embracing love.
i guess i'd better get right on it.

so what now francis?

this summer i spent a few weeks visiting my sister in her new place out in the collection of mud and tarps and tin and thatch and concrete that houses the love and the life that is jubilee blanc. i think we had internet maybe twice during the trip...
but the real reason that we didn't upload pictures and statuses or post blogs is that each moment there demands to be lived in a way that just doesn't allow for the commentary we have become accustomed to here...

in fact...i was inexplicably sick for much of the trip and i am starting to understand that my body was not reacting to germs or conditions...i have faced all that before without such debilitating effects. it was the overwhelming truth of that place and that life that i think my body no more knew what to do with than my heart does. the unrelenting and overwhelming rawness of life i am always confronted with in jubilee...that rawness that can at once be both essential and unthinkable...beautiful and awful...so real and surreal... it is somehow both the reality my heart and body crave but also the truth that is often more than one heart...and one body...can even hold.

i used to say there were two kinds of hippies in the world, the ones who went out and just lived in the woods cause things are bad...and the ones who wouldn't go and just live out in the woods yet cause things are bad...i probably never admitted judging the first kind, probably stopped with how much i didn't UNDERSTAND them. i thought they were all hiding from the truth, giving up, but the more of the world i actually get out and touch, and let touch me, the less i judge, the more i understand, and the closer i get to eating all my words and hauling ass to the woods before i do any more harm than has already been done by would-be world savers before me.

changing the world is hard. and the more intimately you try to know the world, the harder it gets. and forget whether we are capable or not, whether we have enough faith or not, whether we want to or not...what even needs changing...and how much of it is actually out in the world and how much is in our own hearts?
some of those people who i thought were hiding really are...but some of them have have been brave enough to get out and take this look inside and do something with what they found.

i love the ideas of change, about how beautifully simple it can be, about how we can empower and be empowered, about how changing our own world can change the world of everyone who knows us which changes their little worlds which changes the world of everyone who knows them and so on...these lovely swirly ever growing bubbles of truth and goodness and light annoying enough for a coke commercial that i would hate about changing the world. i love believing in change and in truth and rightness. i love sharing that. i love hacking away at my life to make it look more and more like a life that could change the world. i love discovering how much doesn't actually need to change...the unbelievable amount of good and right that only need be returned to or nurtured, brought to light, given space, and invited to grow.

but i talk too much, and even when i am living it, i get sick of how much i talk about it sometimes.

this month i visited my sister in jubilee. she doesn't talk very much. you won't hear her talk much about change, and certainly not about bubbles of goodness and light, but if you are smart enough to shut up a minute and follow her around you will hear something amazing.

the sound of the world quietly being changed.

i would love to say that i was this smart...but it was probably only the fever and fatigue that kept me quiet enough to hear...
everything about lala's life in jubilee screams love and truth and honor and jesus. the way she teaches phonics, the way she pays kids to pick up trash, the way she makes them do it some days for free. the ways she gives out pop tarts, the way she cleans a wound or lances an abcess, the way she eats, the way she doesn't eat, the way she hangs out, the way she gets mad, the way she problem solves, the way she bathes in a bucket on the porch, the way she poops in a hole in the ground...the way she does everything she does honors both the goodness in the life of jubilee that existed before she got there and the potential that exists yet unused in every soul she meets. it says a humble yes to all that is right and good about life there, all that we could learn from that place and the people in it, and a bold and unwavering no to evil and to fear and to everything that is the enemy of hope. she isn't worrying herself with every detail, she isn't agonizing over politics or theology, she isn't wasting time being annoyed with everything that is wrong with...well everything...she isn't thinking about changing things with her life, she is just living her life in a way that changes things.

she says she wouldn't be where she is and doing what she is doing if it weren't for me...and i believe her. at least i believe what she means by this, but i know she could have gotten there in other ways. lots of other people would have believed in her even if i hadn't. but i did, and i am louder than lots of other people...and we have shared a bathroom for most of our lives so i have been around more than lots of other people. but student has most definitely become teacher and little sister has gotten awfully big (yes lala, i am calling you fat :)
she has gone out and just started doing everything she claims i taught her...the stuff i have been learning too much to remember how to just do...watching her reminded me that if i don't feel equipped or fulfilled doing all that analyzing...its probably because it is someone else's calling.

i have been home a while. well, i have spent time in several places i call home since i left hers in jubilee. this summer has given me the courage and the humiliy to go back into the woods a while, my woods anyway, and finish that long look inside i started last year. my body has largely healed, though that "not quite right yet-ness" that comes after illness still lingers...i suspect its source is in my heart maybe as much as in my lymph nodes...so it has been slowly that i get back in tune with the beautiful, crazy, terrible, wonderful noise of the lives i have chosen here on this side of things. all the while, one sound still rings in my ears and i hope i will keep everything else harmonized to it...

...the sound of the world quietly being changed.




i love you lala...more than djeff loves your boots.