Getting one’s head messed with is a tiring process if nothing else. Not only is it painful for the recipient, but surely, you think this cannot be any fun for the person on the other end doing the doing, unless they’re into some weird Voodoo that you don’t know about and that has changed everything and they’re now using you as their human wax doll, sticking pins in your mind where your emotions are, where you now hurt, where your heart is, a crystal cathedral that shatters into a thousand bits, of glass when the pin touches the high arch and you are done for. It shatters to glittering, glistening pieces and falls to the ground where I lie – pretty, but pretty wretched and hurtful as well.
I am tired, I admit. I am too tired to play games now. I want to live and not pretend we’re in junior high school, I want to do away with gossip and the wrong conclusion and so much judgment because if we turn that mirror around and if we turn it on you (meaning the universal you, not the personal you the reader), then I wonder what we would see. Would we see perfection? Would we really see, if we look deep down, someone better than I or would our foibles just be different?
I can’t say. I can say with certainty that I know my foibles and much as I may not like them or they may bother me, even my own minister finds my adventures in my own world of sin somewhat entertaining telling me they (my sins) are rather “sweet” (his word not mine) But my sin will not be told outside the confines of the confessional (sort of like lawyer client confidentiality) And it cuts both ways. The way you hope that when a friend makes promise to you that they will keep and honor that promise.
I’ve long worn a promise bracelet – a bracelet just of a simple thread that falls off when the promise comes true. At least that’s what I’ve heard form several sources and I chose to believe it and so am never without a thread of something on my wrist.
In my dream, I was wearing said thread but with beads on it and suddenly the thread broke and the beads went everywhere, tumbling to the ground like so many minor marbles… I remember in the dream the friend shouting at me to find all of the beads.
It was for this person that I had made the promise yet his anger that I could not collect all the beads made him angry, full of fury (and yes, surely, signifying nothing). I could give my dime store analysis about “getting it all together and how he feels that I an “disheveled” - or losing my marbles, so to speak. But I notice a trend…
Gratitude too is hard to come by. I’ve met people who I thought for sure would be grateful or at least not attack, I’ve written poetry for people – for a person and though the poem was no doubt not the work of Keats, it was good and some of the best I have to offer. Instead of thanks what I found was mere confusion either because they could not or would not or willfully misunderstood the poem (likely the latter) or they just expected something material. Isn’t something home made so much better? Aren’t the books, the CDs, the tapes we make – don’t’ these all mean more than any of this other stuff that’s out there?
My point is so simple yet so complicated… we live in a world that is too often lacking in grace and in such a place, it is often difficult to maintain one’s own grace. For example, when the person who cuts you off gives you the finger, or the person who pulls up behind you in truck in the left lane when you’re going 85 or 90 in pouring rain and brights you for not going fast enough and you know that if you can’t get over, that if you have to hit the gas at some point, if they can’t stop in time (and trust me there would not be enough time they are so close), then what would happen? How can you have such grace then in a world in which you are toast?
I can’t answer these questions only pose them and say that we need to be kinder and less sloppy about how we interact with people. That if we would not say it face-to-face, then don’t say it online, if you wouldn’t say it alone don’t say it with your friends and if you wouldn’t do it with your mother watching, then probably it’s something (apart from one thing) that you should not be doing. These may be simple, but they are a start at some simple rules to live by.
A friend told me, I was charming, gracious, and lovely he wrote, but “forgetful.” Forgetful, scatterbrained, dizzied, a dink, a total and utter dizzy broad. I’m sure to him it was a passing comment but as it passed, that bullet skimmed the skin right off shoulder and I tell you, it hurt like hell and this was a so-called friend.
So tell me then, where will you or I be if not alone when It all comes down…? When the chips are on the table and it’s go baby go, one for the money and two for the show now go cat go… who will be there to save you? Certainly my little red threats will help no one as witnessed by my night terror. Instead, my friend will be there alone and on the floor searching for all the marbles he believes I had lost. This time, he tells me, he believes in promises, in hope.
Only then will he understand true grace and perhaps that is the worst part of all.
I am tired, I admit. I am too tired to play games now. I want to live and not pretend we’re in junior high school, I want to do away with gossip and the wrong conclusion and so much judgment because if we turn that mirror around and if we turn it on you (meaning the universal you, not the personal you the reader), then I wonder what we would see. Would we see perfection? Would we really see, if we look deep down, someone better than I or would our foibles just be different?
I can’t say. I can say with certainty that I know my foibles and much as I may not like them or they may bother me, even my own minister finds my adventures in my own world of sin somewhat entertaining telling me they (my sins) are rather “sweet” (his word not mine) But my sin will not be told outside the confines of the confessional (sort of like lawyer client confidentiality) And it cuts both ways. The way you hope that when a friend makes promise to you that they will keep and honor that promise.
I’ve long worn a promise bracelet – a bracelet just of a simple thread that falls off when the promise comes true. At least that’s what I’ve heard form several sources and I chose to believe it and so am never without a thread of something on my wrist.
In my dream, I was wearing said thread but with beads on it and suddenly the thread broke and the beads went everywhere, tumbling to the ground like so many minor marbles… I remember in the dream the friend shouting at me to find all of the beads.
It was for this person that I had made the promise yet his anger that I could not collect all the beads made him angry, full of fury (and yes, surely, signifying nothing). I could give my dime store analysis about “getting it all together and how he feels that I an “disheveled” - or losing my marbles, so to speak. But I notice a trend…
Gratitude too is hard to come by. I’ve met people who I thought for sure would be grateful or at least not attack, I’ve written poetry for people – for a person and though the poem was no doubt not the work of Keats, it was good and some of the best I have to offer. Instead of thanks what I found was mere confusion either because they could not or would not or willfully misunderstood the poem (likely the latter) or they just expected something material. Isn’t something home made so much better? Aren’t the books, the CDs, the tapes we make – don’t’ these all mean more than any of this other stuff that’s out there?
My point is so simple yet so complicated… we live in a world that is too often lacking in grace and in such a place, it is often difficult to maintain one’s own grace. For example, when the person who cuts you off gives you the finger, or the person who pulls up behind you in truck in the left lane when you’re going 85 or 90 in pouring rain and brights you for not going fast enough and you know that if you can’t get over, that if you have to hit the gas at some point, if they can’t stop in time (and trust me there would not be enough time they are so close), then what would happen? How can you have such grace then in a world in which you are toast?
I can’t answer these questions only pose them and say that we need to be kinder and less sloppy about how we interact with people. That if we would not say it face-to-face, then don’t say it online, if you wouldn’t say it alone don’t say it with your friends and if you wouldn’t do it with your mother watching, then probably it’s something (apart from one thing) that you should not be doing. These may be simple, but they are a start at some simple rules to live by.
A friend told me, I was charming, gracious, and lovely he wrote, but “forgetful.” Forgetful, scatterbrained, dizzied, a dink, a total and utter dizzy broad. I’m sure to him it was a passing comment but as it passed, that bullet skimmed the skin right off shoulder and I tell you, it hurt like hell and this was a so-called friend.
So tell me then, where will you or I be if not alone when It all comes down…? When the chips are on the table and it’s go baby go, one for the money and two for the show now go cat go… who will be there to save you? Certainly my little red threats will help no one as witnessed by my night terror. Instead, my friend will be there alone and on the floor searching for all the marbles he believes I had lost. This time, he tells me, he believes in promises, in hope.
Only then will he understand true grace and perhaps that is the worst part of all.
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