the accidental bohemian

My husband and I were asked to do some music at a friend’s very small non-denominational church gathering recently. When I say small, I am talking about a dozen or so people who meet in a classroom at a Lutheran seminary in our city. The building itself is somewhat sizable with several classrooms and a large chapel. More than one church meets here on Sundays.

As we are walking in we see two different types: the ones wearing their Sunday Best (headed to the chapel for the larger Orthodox service) and the ones wearing, well, whatever the heck they want (headed to one of the classrooms for a non-traditional gathering).

I have never had much exposure to the traditional church setting. I went to a funeral for my first bus-driver in our small town’s Catholic church once when I was very young. I went to a Lutheran church once for Ash Wednesday with my Lutheran friend when we were about ten. At one of our earliest churches, when I was still knee-high, I have vague memories of my mother being verbally lashed by a pearl-sporting old lady who was quite certain my mother was hell-bound for having the audacity to unearth a tambourine from her bag.

No, I was raised in the charismatic movement of the 1980’s and 90’s. You know what I’m talking about. Unbridled enthusiasm, sweating preachers, and meetings till well past midnight where people are laying all over the floor like bomb victims while their children are asleep in the pews under coats. And that is just a typical Tuesday night.

In the churches I am familiar with, people are judged as being stiff and “unopen to the Holy Spirit” if they don’t look like they’re doing some sort of frightening aerobic exercise during worship. We are expected to shout the occasional “Amen!” to cheer on our pastor as he makes good points. Hours are spent after every service in prayer lines seeking healings and miracles for all of our ailments. Every slip in character could be viewed by our fellow congregants as a “Backslide”. And you can’t make it a week without hearing mention of how the world is so evil these days that the “rapture” must be just around the corner.

This is pretty much all I have known of church since shortly after the tambourine threat.

So after Jesse and I did a few songs for this small group of people (who did none of the things mentioned above, by the way) I had to pee. I slipped out of the room and started the hunt for a restroom.

But as I entered the hall I heard a heavenly sound.

I was drawn toward it in a magnetic way.

Echoing through the large center hall, coming from the chapel on the other side of the building I could hear one solitary male voice singing a strange thing.

I made my way toward it, somewhat entranced and violently curious. Then suddenly it stopped and to my delight the entire congregation replied to it in a similar manner.

I slipped closer.

Then the single voice again, alone and confident.

Then the reply.

The door was open and I slinked my way up to it, peering in as much as I could without being rude. Inside were all the ones I had seen entering the building dressed in Sunday Best. The call and response repeated and I listened in absolute delight. I suddenly had the overwhelming urge to join them. I did not want to go back to the little classroom. I wanted to go sit down and observe and experience this new thing. I was curious, yes, but more than anything I was moved spiritually by it.

But I didn’t go in. I found the restroom and slipped back into the meeting I had been invited to, which was still quite pleasant, but I could not get that other service out of my head. I whispered to my husband that I couldn’t wait to tell him what I had seen and heard.

It stayed with me for weeks afterward. After some research I discovered that the tradition I had heard was called a cantor. But it wasn’t this that was sticking with me. It was something deeper than that, something that only took me a few minutes to put my finger on. What I felt as I listened in on that service was Reverence.

In many charismatic churches there is so much wild behavior. This is actually encouraged in many of them as a sign that you really love God. There is also this message that God is your pal, your buddy. There is so much time spent being jubilant and “free” that there is little being taught about reverence. A healthy awe-filled fear of God.

But that isn’t what this post is about.

I’m not here to compare churches. I am neither A: praising the reverent nor B: punishing the charismatic. It’s actually C.

When I was standing in that doorway, moved in such a powerfully spiritual way, I was looking in at a teenage boy that looked about bored enough to eat paper. I know a seventy-five-year-old woman who has a deeply moving experience every time she goes to Catholic mass, she can’t talk about it afterward without tearing up. I know people in charismatic churches who have this same experience. And I know there are people in both that are simply going through old motions with hearts that are bored.

C: The real revelation I got from this experience was that Tradition is in our hearts, not necessarily in our services.

Some people who have known a liberal amount of fun and freedom may need to find a quiet place on their knees to get away from tradition. Some who have spent their entire life on their knees may need to stretch a bit.

I am writing to encourage you… where does your heart feel God? Find out and then GO THERE. Don’t pay mind to people who judge your choice.

The newness and reverence of a traditional service had something special for me, a charismatic-bred individual. That boy that was bored to tears in that traditional church will probably need to find a place where he can stretch his legs and feel a bit more freedom.

Just watch out for weirdos, this is the one thing you will find in every church.

I love to interview people. To ask questions and hear answers, to hear someone’s story. I love stories more than just about anything. And my favorite question of all time to ask is What’s your dream? If you could do absolutely anything what would it be?

Some people know exactly what they want and they lean forward excitedly to tell me all the details.

A Taco food truck!

A residential tree house! 

Some shrug as if they don’t really have one or even care to. And some stop cold as if they just realized they may have missed something very important. As if they want to have a dream, but have just been too busy to think about what it is.

Dreaming is one thing I do a little too well. Meaning, not much else really gets done. My mom used to say I simply lived in my own fantasy world. I have dozens of notebooks filled with ideas and plans and dreams that I have been jotting down, sometimes several a day, since I was a young girl. One thing about dreamers is that they are not always doers. And funnily enough… the thing about doers is that they are not always dreamers. It’s almost as if, to be most effective… we were intended to team up or something…

Can you imagine how many wasted ideas there are sitting in the minds and notebooks of people who simply are not driven to do? And do you have any idea how much wasted energy goes into things that will not really matter in this world because someone who has been designed for action doesn’t have a meaningful direction? (Insert Ritalin)

The thing that is so cool about creation is how it was made to be, in many cases, only possible when people with opposite “parts” come together.

Like the seeds of a man and a woman = new human.

No other combination can make a new human but these opposing ingredients. And so it is with many other things that need creating. The formula for certain creations lies only in the coming together of different people who carry different ingredients for its creation.

A lyricist and a musician.

A builder and an architect.

An owner and a manger.

An investor and a visionary.

A calm adaptive person and a high-energy disciplinarian.

A dreamer and a doer.

I have many other friends who are dreamers like me. We get together and plan until the sun comes up… and then we do nothing with those plans. Because we are too busy making more plans.

I know doers who cluster together and do a whole lot of nothing just to occupy their urge to do. And then sometimes I have to bail them out of jail the next morning.

This is often why businesses and churches and individual lives fail. Because people are not placed where their strengths are. Tasks are not delegated to the ones who were made for them, but to ones who have the wrong parts. In order for any creation to first be conceived, then birthed, then nurtured to greatness, the right people with the right parts must be involved and in their proper places. Mom cannot create sperm and dad cannot create breastmilk. Places please, everyone!

If your church is failing, then you most likely do not have the proper people with the proper strengths in their proper places. If your business is failing, then you most likely do not have the proper people with the proper strengths in their proper places. If your life is failing, you are likely missing key people with key strengths in key places. We were made for collaboration and bonding. Some of us were made more independent than others, but every one of us needs to join with other opposing parts in order to create certain things. Without them we will only have seeds.

I have a part that fits in your deficit! I have a deficit that needs your part! : magic.

My mind has been doing a funny thing for the past few days. It has been stirred up into a chaotic state of emotionality, something a bit less common for me and very much unwelcome. I tend to live primarily in the world of reason and logic, peaceful and relatively drama free. If I think that logically something shouldn’t upset me then I simply decide that it doesn’t and that’s that.

But when it comes to certain old wounds or certain people that have a long history of hurting me (even if it is unintentional) every once in awhile I fall into this state of being quite ill with pain that renders me unable to eat. All I can do is alternate between devastated crying, angry ranting, and finally falling into a surrendered state of sitting and staring, completely emotionally drained. I’ve made several turns through this cycle over the past three days.

Which is why I couldn’t write this morning, because I was in the middle of devastated crying which then shifted to angry ranting and no one wants to hear any of that. But now I have reached the surrendered state of sitting and staring, completely emotionally drained once again, which is a safe place to write from because it will not include things like whining or a hit list with one name on it.

Have you ever seen that movie Envy with Ben Stiller and Jack Black? It’s about this invention that one of them (Black) creates which makes poop disappear and the other one (Stiller) is consumed with envy at his friend’s sudden overnight success over this stupid invention.

But in time the environmentalists get all stirred up and begin picketing, demanding in their chant: “Where does the shit go? We wanna know!”

As the angry picketers in the movie have so shrewdly pointed out, it can’t just disappear. And if you use a method that does seem to make it magically disappear, you should be very suspicious of where it actually went because it simply can’t be that easy.

It has to go somewhere.

I have noticed that emotional pains are like those viruses that get into your system and can go completely undetected for years until one day something triggers it and it takes you by storm. We may even think something is totally dealt with, in the past, forgotten, and then one day something happens that stirs it up like it happened yesterday, fully equipped with a bullet-pointed list of the exact details of the offense.

Because after we get hurt there is shit left over. Residue. And it has to go somewhere. Until we are ready or able to deal with it, it can settle down into a quiet corner of the soul and wait patiently for the day it gets kicked alive and reminds you it has been there all along.

When this happens it takes on the form of flu-like symptoms. The feelings rise up in you like emotional nausea until you cannot take it anymore and you vomit them out. You may scream, cry, shout, write, or beat up a pillow, and every minute of it you are thinking I hate this, it feels terrible, I am miserable with this but you know it has to come out. And afterward you get that immediate relief that comes after vomiting. A calm overtakes you and the nausea may even subside for awhile. But then a little while later it starts rising up again. And the cycle begins all over. Soon you will need to purge again. And this is the cycle that takes place in your body when you are ill, and in your soul when you are in emotional pain:

nausea

purge

relief

nausea

purge

relief

This is detox. It must take place if there is something toxic in us and if it never does then the toxin will always be in us because the shit doesn’t just disappear: It has to go somewhere. And this detox has to keep happening until all the “virus” is expelled and your emotional system has built a new level of immunity (strength) for battling with it. Sometimes it goes away for awhile and then comes back up days, weeks, months, or even years later. But don’t be fooled into thinking the shit just disappears. It has to move from inside to outside and the transition is never pretty.

I once read a story about the guy who created the Bragg’s brand. He was a very sickly kid and received mercury injections during childhood thanks to the idiotically misguided evolving ideas of the great medical system. Anyway, he got smarter as he got older and started implementing natural healing methods. He got stronger and stronger, healthier and healthier, became a well-known athlete that did crazy things like swim across channels and stuff. Anyway, as the story goes, after years and years of being in his peak health he was on some excursion alone with a canoe in the wilderness when suddenly he got this intense cramping in his gut. He quickly went ashore where he passed a quarter cup of liquid mercury from his bowels! See, that mercury was always still in his body. Why? Because to pass it out, to detox it, could have killed him at another time of his life, when his body and immune system were weaker. His body had to be strong enough to handle the detox. To move that poison from the dormant places in his body where it was hiding to one concentrated place, and then ultimately to the outside, where it would never harm him again.

Where does the shit go? It hides. It waits. Until the right time to be released.

If it doesn’t get triggered on it’s own, there are things you can do to help it come up and out, like fasting.

Where does the shit go? It’s in there, dormant, waiting for the day you are strong enough to battle through the detox.

This weekend was one of those family events that I was both violently excited for and completely exhausted about in advance: My little cousin’s wedding. She and I grew up more like sisters and I have adored her like a little pet of great cuteness all of her life. I was to be one of her bridesmaids.

It was a beach wedding in Duluth beautifully equipped with lots and lots of sand and a quaint little beach clubhouse for the reception all covered inside and out with weathered wood.

I drove alone to Duluth the day before the wedding to help get things finished up and since I still have a good measure of social retardation, my awkward blunders began immediately upon my arrival, starting with my very first stop at Walmart to help my mom and aunt pick up a few extra things.

From a distance, I saw someone in the deli who I could have sworn was a good friend from school. Though we haven’t seen each other in person in seventeen years we email each other book chapters from the novels we are each writing (John!).

I wandered over to the Deli counter to get a better look and ended up standing behind him in line until he turned and told me to go ahead, he wasn’t getting anything. At this moment I began studying his face, noticing the similarities were striking, but he was much older than I had thought from the distance and his hair was greying. As I ran these figures through my head I just stood there staring at him blankly for several seconds too long without speaking and his friendly cheerful face suddenly fell. I shook my head and mumbled something like “uh, no” and wandered away, leaving him looking confused and perhaps a little wounded.

I then audibly talked to myself about the scene for the next twenty minutes or so, as I walked along behind my mom and aunt watching them load gigantic tubs of sour cream into the cart, about how I could have handled the entire thing differently and how I hope I didn’t hurt the guy’s feelings (especially when we awkwardly passed one another again and his eyes caught mine for a second before casting downwards quickly, looking slightly rejected.) This upset me further and I wish I would have told him why I was really staring at him and acting strange about it.

That day I was one of the weird people at Walmart everyone is always talking about. People regarded me with curiosity and maybe a little bit of fright. Of course it’s my hair, so I am used to it. The way-up-north culture sees very little of small white women with a massive head of wild dreadlocks. But being aware of this I make sure to smile and make eye contact often: (see, I am a nice clean respectable person). But I often turn to find a person staring at me looking stunned and uneasy so I smile at them, but they most often look away quickly without returning it as if I might be dangerous or contagious.

The thing about being different in whatever way, is that you often find yourself on the outside of where everyone else seems to be.

So my mystery for today is:

How to be Present & Available (and not a snob) When you are Different 

I see it all the time: People who are set apart, who choose to be different in certain ways, acting as though this elevates them to a separate plane from those they now see as the lowly commoners.

Those who have chosen to find the success of the business world often put off this aura of not being available to associate with the rest of the working class world.

People who are set apart in the church world often act as though they cannot associate with those that are rougher around the edges in lifestyle.

Those that eat a certain way act as though they may get Leprosy if they don’t sneer at the food that is offered them whilst simultaneously whipping a bag of carrots from their pocket with vigor in a self-righteous display designed to say: I was prepared for this situation and have brought protection from your swill!

And if you’ll notice the pattern: these people put off an aura of self-righteousness that sends people even farther from them, isolating themselves in their own little sad world of sameness, devoid of diversity and flavor.

I happen to be very different when it comes to most things. I like things a certain way and it happens to be the opposite of the way most people I know like them. But I also greatly value diversity. I would hate it if everyone I knew was exactly like me. How boring! I am around me all the time. I want something different than that.

And as we ladies went from place to place on the wedding day getting ready, I was doing everything different than the rest of the girls, but I was still present with them. I missed nails because it was so early, so I did my own in my Jeep. While the rest of them were getting their hair curled with hot irons, pinned to their heads in elaborate coifs with six hundred bobby pins and sprayed with enough hairspray as to become susceptible to open flame from a great distance, I sat with my wild mess of curly hair in an empty chair and talked and laughed with them. While they were getting their faces adorned with prom night levels of painted-ness I watched and told them how beautiful they looked while my face remained clean and natural the way I like it. At the Hibachi grill for lunch as they were getting saki sprayed directly into their mouths by the chef I was being just as funny and goofy with them sober, because I happen to dislike alcohol. But never in any of it did I feel like I wasn’t present with them, really there. And never once did I think my way was better then theirs. I adored them just the way they all were and felt honored to be with them through it all.

For the wedding I convinced the other bridesmaids to go barefoot with me. And then I ate with everybody, selecting things from the spread that I felt comfortable eating and filling my plate with them, never once making it obvious that I had a different sort of diet and even commenting authentically on the fine choice of caterer (Famous Dave’s!).

Some people take their differences and they walk around a room holding them up like entitlements. You can feel the very statement I think I am better than you are oozing off of them like a nasty odor and it makes people avoid them. These people are isolating themselves. They will never thrive like this, not really, because true thriving is cultivated in real relationships with a wide variety of people sorts.

I may be different, but that should not make me feel like I’m better than anyone. When I catch myself thinking this way (it happens to everyone at some point) I give myself a nice sobering kick in the ego backside and tell myself to come back down to earth and join the rest of humanity. I may do things a certain way but that does not mean I should isolate from people who don’t. I may have diet preferences but I never want to make anyone feel like what they offer me is not good enough. I may not like drinking but I can get silly with my friends when they get tipsy (and sometimes they don’t even notice that I am not). I may go to church but that does not define me, I don’t feel much different from the guy leaning on the open bar with red cheeks and I will stop and have a laugh with him because he looks like he is fun and we are related now. I may be a big cousin but yesterday I was a proud big sister and I enjoyed every minute of being a part of and present for a thing that was very different from me.

With all my love I would like to congratulate Jeremy and Kate Wagenbach. I love my new family. I am so grateful that you two brought us all together.

If I was ever to choke on something I would want it to be an ice cube. The reasons are obvious. I have never actually choked before but I have gotten plenty of the wrong foods in my windpipe and even this makes me briefly feel like I might die sometimes. So I cannot imagine how upsetting it would be to actually choke. I do have a friend who got a piece of meat lodged in his throat at a dinner party seven years ago and he literally suffered post traumatic stress because of it and was never quite the same afterward.

The only way that this is really connected with the mystery for today is because they both involve food.

The Mystery of Falling Down the Up Escalator

My husband and I are both really dedicated health food people who are also huge foodies. We like lots of good food, real food, authentic goodness from incredible sources made into delightful and artistic combinations by amazing people like elderly Thai ladies and the French. We would never set foot in most restaurants or grocery store chains unless forced. We are dedicated co-op and farmer’s market and Whole Foods shoppers. We do tons of cooking and bake marvelous desserts with complicated names from scratch and we know the best places in our city where food is served the way we like it. Everyone wants to come over to our house for dinner. Perhaps this is really why they like us.

That said, traveling used to be a nightmare for us when we were first married in our early twenties and just figuring things out. Before we had our travel camper equipped with its kitchen and fully stocked pantry, we were the kind of travelers that I imagine looked more like a biblical family of 98 people including servants  and cattle making a move across the dessert with an entire household of goods.

One such trip I remember well was a four day venture to Kansas City for a conference that our church was attending as a group. Of course while they all carpooled, he and I drove together separately, partly because we hate being trapped in a vehicle with other people for long stretches of time (especially church people all hyped up on caffeine and the prospect of talking about nothing but Jesus for the next four days) and partly because of the heft of our luggage. The tailgate of our car was likely sagging a bit with the effort.

It wasn’t that we had lots of clothing or anything like that. It was that we knew there was no easy way to get good food where we were going due to the circumstances of the conference. We knew there were few options but to eat at places like Denny’s and Subway and the very idea of what four days of this type of food would do to our digestion and mental health scared us even more than the wild herd of buzzed-up Christians.

I still wish I had gone to the front desk and pleaded with management to see the surveillance video of the hotel lobby that day.

We entered heavily burdened with our loot.

Multiple bags slung over our shoulders, two pull-behind suitcases, one very large cooler on wheels and a full-sized fan. The bags, the suitcases, and the cooler covertly concealed a hot plate, a VitaMix, pots and pans, utensils, oils, sauces and spices, dried fruits and organic cheeses, almond milk and protein powders, fruits and vegetables, and seeds and nuts and granolas, organic meats and whole grains.

Essentially, we were planning to secretly convert our hotel room into a gourmet kitchen.

My burden was heavy and cumbersome but I happen to be two things. One, a mom. We can carry obscene amounts of baggage, it is one of those gifts that comes in with breast milk. And two, I grew up a farm girl. This needs no explanation. I am freakishly strong for my size.

The hotel had a lower lobby and an upper lobby connected by escalators. At this time it was so vacant, not one person was visible, so luckily there were no witnesses. The sounds of our heaviness and muffled clanking broke through the silence creating an aura of arrival clumsiness that usually only internationally traveling tourists are capable of pulling off.

Jesse led the way, mounting the moving staircase ahead of me and I followed along behind, not even slightly suspecting how wrong things were about to go.

I got on the escalator and began moving upwards, when suddenly, three feet behind me, the wheel of my pull-behind suitcase caught on an unmoving part at the bottom and failed to begin the ascent with me.

Looking back it is clear what I should have done. But this may be the most commonly spoken phrase in world history.

Instead of simply letting go, I had a brief flash of frantic possession (My hotplate!) and I closed my fingers around my suitcase in a death grip, refusing to release it to the abyss of the lower lobby, a loss that seemed suddenly surmounting and frighteningly permanent.

Jesse was turned around facing me, up nearer the top so he saw the whole thing. Our eyes locked and mine widened in horror. I may have made an initial sound like a whimper but other than that the entire scene unfolded in near silence until Jesse’s laughter began.

So there I was, my body moving upward, but my arm attached to something that was not. My uprightness slowly tilted backward farther and farther until I finally lost my balance and began tumbling down. Except the staircase was still moving up at the same time so I really didn’t seem to move from my spot, just tumbled end over end right there as I fell down a moving-up staircase, still clinging with all my might to my beloved baggage. All the other bags I was carrying toppled around me like we were being tumble-dried together.

I want to say my husband was concerned at first before the laughter overtook him, but I’m not entirely sure that’s true. I can’t say how long it was before I righted myself. The way I remember it, I was caught in the limbo of falling down the going-up stairs, remaining exactly in the same spot, about five feet from the bottom, for a solid thirty seconds, but it was likely over much quicker than that.

The conclusion is fuzzy in my memory because the laughter overtook me violently as well at some point and the two of us didn’t stop laughing for the next two weeks or so.

Every person we told the story to, complete with play-acting it out, and there have been A LOT over the past seven years, has asked me the same question.

Why didn’t you just let go?

It’s interesting to me that it seems so logical. And I even tend to be a fairly logical person. Yet at the time, logic was the farthest thing from me. Maybe God fogged it from my mind in order to give us a painfully aerobic laugh and a funny story to tell for years to come.

Or maybe, when we are faced with a choice, that is laced with panic, to let go or to cling to something we find valuable, no matter how sure we are that we would make “the logical choice”… we all most often… cling.

If we are moving, and the thing we are clinging to is not… well, we all know how that goes.

Whatever it is you may be clinging to that’s preventing your ascent to the upper lobby… Just figure out, no matter what it takes, how to let go of it.