God is the madwoman in the attic.
I'm camped out on the threshold with my journal, camera, and plenty of snacks.

Sunday, October 07, 2007

starting to push

A few days ago, I got an email from an old friend who I haven't heard from in months (a year?). I haven't written back yet. In thinking about what to tell her about the last six months and today, I felt overwhelmed. It was another tossing and turning early morning.

I finished grad school back in March and L & I married at the end of that month. My plan was to take an interim job while networking for the kind of work I really wanted to be doing as well as for contacts for articles and ideas I really wanted be writing. But then I got pregnant.

The work I want to do faded in significance in contrast with preparing for a child. We moved. Tried to practice thriftiness. I wrangled with pregnancy fatigue and queasiness and a shifting, expanding, list of physical challenges. My attention turned inward: taking care of my body, tending my relationship with L (threadbare in places after the final months of grad school), making our new place a home - my nest, reading, remembering spiritual hunger & practices, settling in to a tiny world.

It is good. And I'm sad. Have I lost my way to good work out in the world? Can I still do something meaningful out there? Because I still want to. I hedge about what it may be, and that suggests some more inner work to do, but even that personal work will be advanced and proven by public work.

I've been learning that faith is about pushing against the shadow. It's about taking risks. I'm more of a thinker than a believer but this may be where I have to start pushing. Against the shadows cast in the corners of the small world. Against the big loomy shadow of the world out there. Against the either or, the choosing one or the other, as if one were always in light and the other in darkness and it always looks to be the other way 'round depending on which one you are in.

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