I just wrote a poem "I wonder why" and I guess I needed to write about it further. My poetry and my writing these days seems so quietly reflective that I cannot help but wonder - why the sadness, why the nostalgic tone and pleading. I act much less sad, and hopefully, don't look the part, at least not too badly. My friend Trina came over the other day and she sent me a text later, curious to know if I was okay, or just, overwhelmed. I love that word these days. Overwhelmed. Its connotation doesn't bring pleasantries. The word usually pushes me under, treading in a deep sea of housework and errands and things to do and life to live and all the words I'd really love to read but haven't the time to bother with. Those books sitting there. And, The Book. It calls me from my nightstand, and I uncomfortably ask the air whether it's even something I can apologize for. Does God accept apologies or only confessions? I am unsure, to tell the exact truth.
But, I am overwhelmed. In all ways. I am still dancing in my living room, singing made up songs and my heart is full of a little quiet joy that I mix into those peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and unwrap with those extra sweet treats before lunch. I can read a few more books, in character, and I have the energy to fold that third load of laundry with a lightness, knowing that I can do for others without the weight of blame anchoring me down to the murky bottom, a pit where my guilt and regret swim deep. Yet, each time I sit to write, something like sadness comes out. I am not sure what it is, or why. I am trying to distill, just to know a bit more. Like a delicate wound, I am inspecting closer tonight to see what is there below. The wound is mine, but it is its smallness that fascinates me, my thin papercut door that won't open unless I ask it to. So I guess, tonight, I am asking. Just keep writing and keep asking, that's all I can do.
What comes to me is that we are unlike other animals or living creatures that experience only instinct and live freely without will. They are born to surrender. Birds cannot choose silence. Snakes cannot disavow prey. No matter what size or purpose or place, animals obey, and whether they feel emotion or sense pain or seek contentment, they obey, always, a calling from beyond a moral conscience.
In a way, I feel like that is how I chose to pretend to live, before God came to me and asked me to obey Him. Everything I did in my life, and all my decisions, I felt it was beyond my conscience to understand, or know, or to really have the power to choose. But instead of surrendering to God's calling, I surrendered to my own. My primal love of self to live as though I was an object of some foreign inertia, pulling me in to whatever deep dark and light places I felt I deserved. There is no limit to a godless conscience.
But it is in this way that I was most disobedient - my absolute refusal to want nothing else except to be happy, as much as I could, all the time, no matter the cost, or the neglect, or the hurt. My own happiness, my own pride, and reflecting that in the way I acted or the way I lived - that's all that really mattered. Self-exaltation, right? "Just obey your own instinct. You will always know what to do." That is how my former conscience instructed me to live.
Now that I am trying to listen to God, to obey Him and His word, I just feel - more. So much more. My great tide, pulling me in and pushing me out, beyond myself, to reach past the will I want and nearer to His will. I hear Him calling me to obey - not my own demanding voice, but His, the small distant one, the one that climbs into my writing day after day, and sits like a friend inside my poems. And in these recent poems, the ones filled with topics where I spit out "I" much more than "Him", I feel somewhat ashamed. I want to apologize to God - "Have I forgotten about you? Why am I not writing about you today?" And within that distant voice, a luminous one and kind, He tells me like laughter I am writing about Him every time I write, that He's inside every single poem, and every word, and all the spaces in between.
So, I think I am realizing. It's not sadness I feel. It's not sadness in my poems. It's being alive in the Lord. It's knowing sin, it's knowing love, it's knowing what it means to stand aside from the directive of your own partial self and obey the fullness of a will you cannot understand. To sing, or dance, or write, not simply because it is your will to do so, but because your open heart knows that it is against His will to not do so. To be given a song but not sing, a silent bird. Listening now, I know. Sadness only lives in my silence.
It is a glorious and beautiful thing, this love of God, and it is breaking me, down to my knees, flush against a wide sky of emotion. Overwhelmed, I can do nothing but surrender and write the song that fills me.
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