Friday, November 30, 2018

Things I'm loving



1. The Balcony Scene song from Baz Luhrman's Romeo and Juliet. I've been listening to it on repeat since Alex, Sonja and I watched the film on Saturday. Alex and I had gone to watch the RSC production in the Barbican earlier that evening, but the lack of chemistry between the leads meant we needed some more loving in our lives, and so we turned to the electric attraction between Leonardo diCaprio and Claire Danes.

2. This incredible company - Outside In. It is a streetwear brand which addresses the problem of homelessness, recognising that it isn't simply a problem of houselessness but also one of hopelessness and isolation (in some cases). Each product you buy comes with an extra product to give to someone in need, so connections can be made between the consumer and a homeless person.

3. This cookie recipe - another genius way to use chickpea flour (that stuff is incredible). I've been having them with rooibos tea and it feels like a warm hug.

4. This blog which combines two things I love - poetry and good food.

5. Getting to pray with Jacob every night - and knowing that if I'm having a bad day I can ask for prayer from him and he will, in a different city, lift me before God. This morning presentation nerves were a little overwhelming, and even a chickpea cookie and rooibos tea didn't calm it. So I asked for prayer and he reminded me 'God's got you', a good thing to think over on my cycle, and while I listened to the other presentations and when I finally stood up in the last bit of class to do mine. (It was fine!)

Thursday, November 29, 2018

Learning helplessness




On Wednesday last week, I listened to the John Piper devotion titled ‘We All Need Help’. It was easy to agree to what he was saying as I microwaved my porridge and ate it in the safety of my room. 

‘Yes, Lord, I need help,’ I mused in my mind, as I helped myself to another spoonful of peanut-butter laced breakfast.

Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need. (Hebrews 4:16)

Every one of us needs help. We are not God. We have needs. We have weaknesses. We have confusion. We have limitations of all kinds. We need help.

But every one of us has something else: We have sins. And therefore, at the bottom of our hearts we know that we do not deserve the help we need. And so, we feel trapped.

[…] Because we have a Great High Priest, the throne of God is a throne of grace. And the help we get at that throne of grace is mercy and grace to help in time of need. Grace to help! Not deserved help — gracious help. That’s why the High Priest, Jesus Christ, shed his own blood.

You are not trapped. Say no to that lie. We need help. We don’t deserve it. But we can have it. You can have it right now and forever. If you will receive and trust in your High Priest, Jesus the Son of God, and draw near to God through him.

Later that day I found myself in the library, losing myself to the anxiety of planning and trying to please all the people I wanted to meet and worrying about how much work was not getting done in the process, as I looked up restaurant locations on google maps and tried to overcome the reality of London’s vastness. Feeling overwhelmed, I sent a message to my bible study group (feeling again guilty for not going because I felt so anxious) and cycled home, giving myself a good talking to on the way.

‘Miriam – you’ve just got to be firm. You can only do so much. Just find a place, choose a time, and if you can meet them you can, if you can’t you can’t.’ 

Jacob gave very good advice that evening before we prayed – for me to pocket bits of time to focus on things like organising people and life, and to put that out of my mind when I did work – to focus with single-minded intention on work when I need to. So, armed with this practical set of strategies, I went into a new day with more confidence. I turned my phone off when I did reading or writing, I told friends that I needed to leave at specific times to do some work, and I fully engaged with people when I was with them (having fully engaged in work previously).

But it was a false sense of security – that lullaby of ‘I can change things and make everything alright’.  

That became so clear on Friday, when I experienced anxiety as I’d never experienced before. After a coffee with Sally, the beginnings of a knot in my stomach began, a blenched tension that didn’t leave but wound itself tighter within me. I tried to hide the tension (such a physical and also mental feeling) when meeting friends, going to a museum, playing board games. On one level – the rational level- I was having a good day. But my body was telling me everything to the contrary – you are in danger, something is wrong, it hurts, you aren’t normal, something is wrong, wrong, wrong. 
               
This was a different experience to Wednesday – there was no practical solution here. Turning off my phone wouldn’t help, being back home wouldn’t help, knowing my work was done and my friends were there didn’t help. Helpless, and so in need of help. What could I do? I prayed, a garbled thing of ‘God I don’t know why I’m feeling what I’m feeling. I hate this feeling. Help me through it. Help me return to myself. Help me.’ And though I didn’t know what exactly I was feeling and why, I knew that God is good, all the time, and I knew that God listens and answers prayer (something that has been proved time and time again to be over this term in answered prayers for people and circumstances that Jacob and I offer up to God when we pray together before bed).

And God answered the prayers I hadn't said when I didn't yet know this was going to happen - Alex was able to pick up her phone and soothe me when I was crying at the station, and that evening Jacob was in London and gave me a hug that reminded me I am loved and cared for and safe.

This week's poem was written on the train home (and edited afterwards), to do something other than freak out.

1. Hemmed in, on edge,
In my head I am prey:
I cannot eat or I will be eaten.
I walk - poised for flight -


crumpling and uncrumpling
a ticket in my pocket
a ticket out of here.

2. Tomorrow I will wake exhausted
and carry this fragile body into a new day.
Wanting to be held
- the soap dish cradles the soap
and water washes over me -
wanting to be held.

3. And before me a vision
opens like a flower
more sense than sight.
The feeling of dust speckled light
- descended -
on a wood worn table
and porridge, like a promise
warm and there.

Surreal Saturday/TRIBE Run free


(For pictures of how blissfully beautiful the actual course was - click here)

I was in my pajamas by 6pm today (although I subsequently got out of them to go and get some sourdough bread) with a good kind of tiredness in my legs from the trail run this morning.

It felt surreal - handing in two essays at midnight night, having fitful dreams of catching buses and taxis and being late, waking up early and taking the tube to Waterloo, seeing Jacob there and then we were on a big red train, eating oatmeal while outside the window the sun hung low in the sky and shone so you could actually look at it for a split second.

We got off the train with lots of other people evidently there for the run too, walked through forest to get to the starting area, registered and then all so quickly we were running.

I'd told myself this was going to be a run, not a race. This past term I've been learning so much about humbly accepting my limits and not letting my own ambition and competitiveness spoil the joy of the moment or the value of the experience. Fearing my own tendency to look at the numbers on my run tracker instead of the world around me, I decided to run without my phone so I would be oblivious to both distance and time during the race. I'm so glad I did, because it was one of the most beautiful courses I've every run. It was mostly in forested areas, over trails covered in autumn leaves (sometimes those leaf-duvets hid boggy bits of mud) At one point we emerged from forest and ran over a dew-covered field which glittered in the sun. There were steep inclines and exhilarating downhill bits. As I ran I couldn't help but think 'thank you God for this run, thank you for the sun, for legs that work, for seasons...' and put in a little prayer request that in heaven I'd be able to run through fields and forests like this (but better).

The weeks poem ended up scribbled in a ten minute interval before calling Jacob for evening prayer:

There was a sea change in the sunrise this morning
a line of grey cloud across otherwise blue sky
and the smell of last night's bonfires fading.
This wooded path has become familiar,
eroded through the process of intimacy.
A quiet optimism previously shadowed by anxiety
follows my footfall.
The night's turbulence is over
it is all going to be okay.

Friday, November 9, 2018

Poem 5 and why I shouldn't drink tea



Last night I drank two cups of tea
and sank into non-sleep.
This is were the night's terrors reside
the body surrenders and you
are left alone
with your mind.

In the interstices behind your eyelids
a thousand thoughts teem.
Maybe - Police siren - what time is it?
I'll get back - How long have I -
felt like this in a while - police siren -
point of it isn't - those earrings -
police siren - When did I last take -
control - take control -
Police siren.

---------

(That was Tuesday night, after a really enjoyable evening of Thai curry and monopoly with Nic, Nadia and their puppy Hachi.)

(I'm not usually plagued by insomnia, only when I forget my caffeine sensitivity or if I'm too full of excitement or anxiety. But isn't it a terribly real example of just have little control we have even over our embodied self? In so many areas of life success can come through trying, trying harder, trying hardest. But with sleep - trying is failure and only oblivion to the effort means success.)

(I remember seeing that picture in the art gallery of NSW and thinking how magical that sliver of sun was, how the light seemed to actually come from it and dawn over the woman and yet the light also seemed to come from the woman, or at least alight especially on her.)