Disaster Recovery

Accept and you become whole,Bend and you straighten,Empty and you fill,Decay and you renew,Want and you acquire,Fulfill and you become confused.

The sage accepts the worldAs the world accepts the Way;He does not display himself, so is clearly seen,Does not justify himself, so is recognized,Does not boast, so is credited,Does not pride himself, so endures,Does not contend, so none contend against him.

The ancients said, "Accept and you become whole",Once whole, the world is as your home.

(stanza 20 from the Tao Te Ching)

"You know, sometimes it is the artist's task to find out how much music you can still make with what you have left." - Itzhak Perlman

Quoted here.

The grace of God means something like: here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn't have been complete without you. Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid. I am with you. Nothing can ever separate us. It's for you I created the universe. I love you.

There's only one catch. Like any other gift, the gift of grace can be yours only if you'll reach out and take it. Maybe being able to reach out and take it is a gift too.

- Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking

The very first science fiction story I ever read was by Lester Del Rey. I don't remember what it was called, but it was about a boy who lives on one of Jupiter's moons and his robot. The plot line is pretty much standard science fiction (the boy moves away, the robot is repurposed for some menial task, the boy runs away from home, the robot meets him, they run away together.) I don't really remember the whole thing, but one aspect of the story sticks out in my memory.

The robot had a very generic error reporting mechanism. When the mechanism was triggered, the robot could only report "something's broken." It couldn't localize the error. At one point in the story, the robot's "eye circuits" are messed up, and the robot is effectively blind. The problem is, the robot doesn't know "I'm blind." It only knows, "Something's broken." So the robot sits down, and just starts saying, "Something's broken," over and over until the boy actually figures out that the robot can't see.

That's me, talking to God. I can tell that something's broken, but I don't really even know what is broken. I look around myself, at the world, and I know it's a mess, so I sit down and call out to God. "Lord, Something's broken. Either you're not fixing things, or you're fixing things, but my 'God-is-busy-fixing-things' detector circuits are hosed. So, please, add "fix Jim's awareness of repairs in progress" to the list of things you are fixing, so I don't have to sit here, knowing that something is broken, but not knowing if it's me, or if the universe blew a fuse and left us all in the dark."

Either way, He's the only one who can make the repairs.

• Listen to your instinct


• Be who you are


• Do what you have to do


• Know what you believe


• If you begin to doubt, DON'T

It's as if one has stepped off a plane, and is cut loose from anything that might keep one from falling. The sensation is curious; the fear is so overwhelming that it no longer even is a factor. It disappears, or rather merges with the surrounding environment, becoming a constant part of it. One can struggle, but that's futile. No effort can stop the downward plunge; no motion will arrest the constant acceleration. In the end, all you can do is try to not think about the way that the ground is rushing up to meet you, and cling to the hope that somewhere, Someone is moving to pluck you out of the sky before you crash.

The mind searches for answers, trying to determine why.

The heart knows that there are no answers; there are only choices.

The mind protests that there must be factors, there must be determinants, that something must be behind events.

The heart sighs, and waits for the mind to be still.

Then the heart cries, as part of it dies.

When I was young, I thought that life was a matter of understanding. All it seemed to take to have a good life is to desire to know "why." It's as if life was a puzzle, and the solution of that puzzle was simply a matter of study and effort.

As I grow older, the puzzle seems to be coming apart. Pieces that seemed to fit together seamlessly before now are shown to have been bent in order to fit, and are being pulled out of the picture and thrown away. There's little coherence to what remains of the puzzle; it seems as if rather than a picture of something cut up into a puzzle, life is more of a shattered stain-glass window. The shards and pieces still retain something of the original beauty, but the design is fractured and broken beyond any hope of restoration.

The habit of seeking to understand is hard to break. It's hard to just "be" when what you're asked to "be" is broken and incomplete. It's hard, too, to know whether to be broken and incomplete is really what is being asked of you, because it seems so wrong. Something inside of us cries out against the damage that we endure, the separation and loss that we experience.

Spend any time actually being homeless - not the sort of "pretend" homelessness of some sensitivity exercise, but the actual twisted-gut feeling of having no place that you can call your own, and you'll begin to realize how debilitating it is to be in that state. The experience brings a lot of compassion for those caught in homelessness, for whatever reason. We were not made to be vagabonds; we were made each to occupy our particular space, and call it mine and have it recognized as such. "Property is liberty," in that sense.

I'm like a man caught in a river that's in full spring flood. My life-vest will keep me afloat, or at least bring me up for air occasionally, but I can not direct the river. I can only hope that I will breath long enough to see where the river will take me.

Every once in a while, I get an upset stomach. Sometimes the only thing that will help is if I vomit; it's as if my body has decided that whatever I ate isn't going to make it through me, and it needs to come out. It feels terrible, and throwing up is never fun, but there's almost instant relief when it's over.

Lately, I'm finding that crying is like vomiting from my soul. There's things inside me that just aren't going to make it through me, and they need to come out. So I have to set time aside each day to throw up those things, and get them out of me. If I don't, the weight of sorrow will overwhelm me.

It seems like I return to LJ whenever things go wrong. Lately, things have gone wrong a lot.

I find myself in the midst of a divorce. An apparently angry divorce (ironic, because I have spent years learning to manage my anger,) and a messy one (there is a law of the universe that the amount of messyness of a divorce increased geometrically as the number of minor children increased.)

The irony of this situation is uncanny. Two people who couldn't find sufficient energy, motivation and grace to behave like adults when they are married are now somehow magically supposed to find the energy, motivation and grace to behave like adults as they parent the children of their failed marriage.

I offer myself the consolation that at least I wasn't the one who gave up, but even that is ironic. By not giving up, by caring, I complicate things for the rest of the family. If I were a heartless bastard (something I'll be accused of certainly at some point in all this,) I could simply walk away, nurse my wounds, and find someone or something that would nurse my wounds and numb my my pain. But instead, because I care - and because I stayed because I care, for my children and for their mother - I now find that my caring is often worse than useless - it makes for more pain, more distrust, and more confusion.

None of which is enough to make me stop caring. I stayed because I cared, but I also stayed because it was right to care, and I've come to the place in my life where doing the right thing because it is right is better than doing the wrong thing because it is easy.

The ghost of Christmas present

Doorway

Giraffe