lemon ruth

if you think of it as a recipe, there are two parts.

what i’m dealing with now is the mixing of the two.  and it’s turning out to be the most profound experience of my entire life so far.

there are the inherent factors, the facts of who i am, the mechanics of my self.  and then there is the barrage of experiences that have been otherwise external to the mix until now.

the thing about it that makes it so painful is that it’s messy.  i mean, of course it is.  this is nothing less than the reconciling of who i am at my deepest and darkest levels to the outward environment i’ve existed in and made mistakes in and loved in and been disapointed in and disappointed you in.

when you begin to examine your own heart and motives and fears and hopes, you simultaneously begin to see that the lines that separate our experience of life from others’ experience of life are so very thin.

quite frankly the difference between me and some of the homeless kids i work with is a set of good parents.  and the difference between me and some confident girls i know is the absence of heartbreak during their formative years.  this list goes on and on.

and so this particular thinness of lines has been the first struggle i encountered in this journey.  guilt was my most obvious and most primal response.   i mean, why should i have been so privileged from the moment of my birth while others are thrust immediately into insurmountable odds?

but here is what i’m learning:  the dry ingredients of those lives is no different from my own.  i too have felt unwanted and hopeless and i’ve certainly known loss.  it’s the wet ingredients that have differed for us: the experiences they’ve known have often been harsher or at least more frequently harsh.

and so we all are forced to have this same profound mixing experience, no matter the level of disparity between the dry and wet ingredients.  feeling guilty is irrelevant.  we are handed what we are handed, and whether you believe it was random or not, it’s the Fact of existence.  and as such, it creates this amazing puzzle dynamic to the nature of Community.  we need each other, are capable of loving each other, fit together perfectly, because the dry ingredients are similar but the wet ones aren’t.  we are all pieces but of varying shapes.   we are all Human but we experience it so differently.  it’s amazing when you really think about it.

the next struggle: for someone as independent and autonomous as me, it’s a frustrating reality to face the fact that i have no choice in the matter.  i can plan and plan and even arrange the circumstance of my life to a very small degree, but i CANNOT control what is and isn’t going to happen.  in my own life, i am the smallest factor in a huge pot of Factors.  the ending sum is only affected by my tiny variable a proportionately tiny bit.

this does not sit well with me at all.  i want some guarantees!  i want to feel hopeful without even a twinge of doubt.  but that will never happen.  and it shouldn’t.  because despite the mechanics of my self being that i want to have control, the mechanics of the world is that i cannot.

and so the wet ingredients (a.k.a. my experience of this uncontrollable world) meet the dry ingredients in such a way that mixing the two is impossibly painful.

this is why i hide and why i mull and why i start to pack my car to move every few months and then unpack it again and stay right here.

this isn’t my quarter-life crisis or boredom with my job or the final remains of love lost.  no, this is much much more.

this is the struggle at the very core of humanity.  how to reconcile the internal to the external.  how to be “yourself” in the midst of “everyone else” and to even know what “yourself” is in the first place.

this is only the very outer edge of my thoughts at the moment, but i’ve already rambled on for too long.  i have plenty more in my head, but i’ll just let that mix a little bit more before pouring it out.

love, LR