Hi friends! Can you believe I’ve kept up with these (yes, three posts counts as “keeping up”)?? If you’re here for poetry, there will be more in the next week or so. For now, a little life update.
I realized today I haven’t heard an f-bomb in weeks.
They used to be part of my daily soundtrack, used with religious fervor and artistic abandon by many of my fellow subway-riders and street-haunters. Swearing is a New Yorker’s litany, a release of the tension that inevitably builds as so many different people in so many different kinds of pain live crammed together.
Weirdly, I miss the swearing. It is so different from what I was raised among, so different from what I personally practice, but it was a kind of in-your-face humanity, an aggressive yet poignant reminder of other people’s existence and experiences, how we all shared the same space and the same air and many of the same aggravations. It’s bonding. It’s funny.
And sometimes, of course, it’s grating. Sometimes I thought if one more person yelled in my vicinity, I would scream my own string of swears. I don’t miss that. And I don’t miss the smell or the trash or being touched by so many strangers.
One of my best friends from New York came and visited me last week, and it was fascinating to see my new world through her eyes. She remarked that it seems like the thing for people to do here (at least in my very specific circles) is to make meals together and linger over them. In New York, we're often too busy to do that, and so we hang out over coffee in between other appointments or over a meal prepared at a restaurant or delivered by an Uber driver. People ask me what I miss about New York, and I say the energy. There’s nothing like a Brooklyn street, nothing. But also the often-frenetic pace means that long, slow, inefficient home-cooked meals are rare feats instead of the go-to way to socialize. So I find myself stuck: I miss the energy there and yet I like the space and slowness here.
I think of myself as someone good at holding the both-and, the tensions, and all my life has been an exercise in leaving my heart in different places. But still this is hard, the coming to love on place while still being terribly in love with another.
A mentor told me recently, you can have two homes. And of course I know that, but also I forget it, and there is always that little voice burrowed just beneath my skull that says: But can you? Can you really?
Does that make the word home meaningless? Am I betraying one love by forming another? And how many new homes can I make before my patchwork hearts splits along its many seams and spills out onto the street?
I don’t know, but I know love is strong. Love kept me rooted to the New York’s smelly, vulgar streets, and I cannot stop the new tendrils sinking into the soil here. I could live without giving my whole heart to things, I suppose, but I don’t want to. As much as love makes me vulnerable, it also makes me brave.
I have noticed in my writing on here and in my conversations with long-distance loved ones that I don't talk much about my classes. It surprises me, and them, because I thought that's all I would want to talk about. Some of my classes, like Hebrew, don't lend themselves well for updates (“guys, I learned how to affix the definite article to nouns today!”), but I think part of it is that I am very much in media res, and while I am a fast learner in some areas, I am a slow processor. I care deeply about accurate, nuanced syntheses of ideas and experiences, which just don’t happen quickly. So I look forward to the day when all that I am learning and reading and thinking about is distilled enough to summarize, but I'm not going to push myself to do so until I'm ready. Thanks for being here anyway. :)
Instead, here is a short list of bits and bobs in my head right now:
pronominal suffixes (for both prepositions and pronouns, oh joy!)
grids: examples of materiality or eternity?
the four horizons of art interpretation: anthropological, political, spiritual, theological
the ambivalence of the body in medieval spirituality
the intersection of conservative Christian gender accounts and Judith Butler’s queer theory
do art and scholarship count as evangelism?
the five steps of writing a sermon: structure, context, theme, aim, communication
And always, always, there is Anselm’s Proslogion—his prayer before laying out his famous argument for the existence of God—that I try to keep before me, so much so that I’ve taped it to my wall:
Teach me to seek you, and reveal yourself to me as I seek, because I can neither seek you if you do not teach me how, nor find you unless you reveal yourself. Let me seek you in desiring you; let me desire you in seeking you; let me find you in loving you; let me love you in finding you.
My philosophy professor in undergrad said that the most important thing we could learn from this medieval theologian-philosopher was not the minutiae of his arguments but his approach to studying (and any endeavor, really): to beg for the grace to understand, to remember that all intellectual capacity and insight is the gift of God, that we cannot seek to know Him without Him enabling even that desire.
We had a stretch of absolutely perfect October days here, and I am banking on the memory of them getting me through whatever this wet, gray winter will bring. The sun shone through the $6-Facebook-Marketplace plant on my windowsill and set it utterly ablaze like emerald fire. My friend and I took a ferry to a nearby island, and the drop of the pine cliffs straight into the sea was incomprehensibly beautiful. I have been filled physically and emotionally by so many good meals, poured into far more than I have yet poured out here, and I feel like I’m racing to keep up with God’s goodnesses.
And yes, there are lonely moments. Sharp pangs when I realize how far I have to go for this to feel like home. So many Instagram posts on my feed about New York that reopen the wound. Walks upon walks where I keep giving the same gnawing desires and questions back to God again and again—for how long?
But still, I want to recite beauty to myself with the passion of a New Yorker swearing. I’m living the answered prayer. That’s the mantra of this fall, and I’ll keep saying it until it sinks in.
I hope for you, friends, that you can see the answered prayers you’re living in. And that you have the tenacity to keep asking the unanswered questions. Much love to you all.
to staying awake,
Aberdeen
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