One day I wrote this.

The other day I lied in bed and i thought to myself “so much about being alive is beautiful.”
And it is one of those things that you think to yourself despite the pain of living
and despite the agony that comes upon the possibility that one day we won’t see or hear or feel.
And so I told thought in my head a little prayer that said
“That if you one day all of this will just be black holes, 
I do hope that isn’t so.
Please Mr. Universe, don’t ever end.”
Even if I am gone and will never perceive a thing once again.
Only for the hope that all this beauty will continue to be experienced again and again and again by someone else who I will never be;
my wish is that the beauty will still be here.

To what could be.

I do not know what to or what not to expect.

If anything, to say yes to forever, I hope never to neglect what form your insides have taken. They have a history all apart, all so different from my own. You had a life before we met. 

Your life. YOURS. Different from what I could imagine, though I like to believe that when I close my eyes and you recount the stories spilling into your memory and then out of your mouth, that I can see them in my head exactly... but probably not.

And when you will share your photographs with me, I would like to believe that when my mind attempts to chronicle the adventures and the laughter that shaped you into who you are today.. that I might be able to know them for myself... yet... probably not. Probably, I won't. Our timelines never touched until we met.

When I say yes to forever because forever is what we say to whom we hope to be our truest friends... I think that I do not want to know what to or what not to expect sense the way of perfectionism goes like this: I would like to have control of, to pretend to know and to say that I love mystery and yet not embrace him when I see him in you.

So I will say, "I will forsake friendship! And I will avoid romance! Because look at how noble I try to make myself seem! because look at all the mistakes I do not want to and probably will make!" I could and I will probably make the mistake of not letting you have your life one particular day. Or maybe many, so how could I live with myself at the thought of doing that to you? -- and yet, we are all traveling and everything beautiful comes our way when we choose to travel. And yet, we see only so little when we stay in one place, trapping ourselves in our lonely houses where we each grew up.

I do not know what to expect.

So if I should catch a glimpse of who you are and who you are not, I want to be able to say that more than few of the times that you've passed your filled hand to me that it was then that I offered you up into the sky like an explosion of confetti to twirl all around our world, landing into special places in the dirt that I could never pin point.

To be okay with that, I'd hope a peace like that would shape wrinkles of gladness to the side of my eyes.

But, I do not know what to expect. 

Perhaps for today, I can rest in that.

So Rachel, what are you into these days anyway? -- Part 1

I think, sometimes a person needs a place to reflect and share what they like. As someone who struggles with people pleasing and speaking up, I find it important to learn to share. I have gone too long, keeping my voice silent when I sense that others may disagree or that there is no one in the room who may affirm my thoughts. My supervisor says it's okay to march to the beat of our own drum, as long as we're being authentic with ourselves. Maybe then, we'll meet others who will care about our authentic selves, our authentic thoughts and our authentic loves.

So, I thought I would carve out a little place to share what I'm into these days, some of the things people are doing and writing about that I'm pretty dang excited about.

Blogs:

I read a heck of a log of blogs and right now, I have hella-huge cyber girl crushes on bloggers Kathy Escobar and Emily Maynard (among other bloggers I have cyber crushes on). These bloggers have some pretty fierce voices. Kathy is super passionate about:  "community, the marginalized, healing, spiritual transformation, equality, justice, “church”, relationships, diversity, and learning to love and be loved," as she shares in her about me on her website. On the other hand, Emily is unapologetically learning to speak up on topics having to do with purity culture, 

Right now, Kathy's particpating in a synchroblog about pain, a topic many people tend to avoid. But, as someone who is dealing with a lot of pain as of late (more on that later), I think this subject is so important, especially, too, seeing how so many people around me are in pain as well.

Finally, I want to promote Dan J. Brennan's blog. He tends to write mostly on friendship and intimacy and is a huge advocate for cross-gendered friendships. Dan believes that men and women truly can have platonic, non-romantic relationships that are honest and deep. As someone who happens to have a good portion of my closer friends be male, I enjoy getting to read Dan's thoughts on this subject. It is challenging and fairly sensitive to those who may disagree.

You can check these their blogs as well as some other neat blogs I read here:

kathyescobar.com 

emilyispeakingup.com  

danjbrennan.com 

papyruswillgrow.com

gabbingwithgrace.com

Books:

I'm still reading Community and Growth by Jean Vanier. We read the first chapter of the book as a printed PDF as part of my curriculum/training for Mission Year. I enjoyed it so much that I decided to order the whole book and read through it. It's basically about living in intentional community and Jean Vanier shares the insights that he has gained over the years that he spend with the L'arche community living and loving alongside people with disabilities.

I also picked up The Long Loneliness by Dorothy Day from my friend Karen's place. The book is an autobiography about Day. Dorothy Day is a Catholic activist and one of the co-founders of the Catholic Worker Movement, which is a community of folks who work for peace and live in solidarity with the poor and oppressed. Now, there is a Catholic Worker in just about every major city (and maybe even your small town). I have a messy habit of reading multiple books at the same time and picking up past books in the middle of the new ones I'm reading. But, I've had a general curiousi

Other:

Seed Savers Exchange -- I requested a free catalog from this group after one of my new friends introduced me to it. They’re a non-profit dedicated to saving and sharing non-GMO heirloom seeds! I’ve yet to decide what else I want in my garden, but, it’s been sweet looking through the catalog and seeing how many type of tomatoes they have. Some of the species in the catalog were about to be extinct, but were saved! WOOHOO!

Cheap Girls -- I’ve been familiar with the name, but, I had not taken time to listen to until recently. I would describe them to be a pop rock band from a mid-western town called Lansing. I really like their song “Ruby” which I first heard played acoustically with Ryan Russell’s project, Nervous Energies.

Curly Nikki -- is a website started by a woman named Nikki Walton about "natural" hair and hair care. Hair is often a really big deal for women who identify as Black in many ways because of our unique hair texture and how it's been a struggle to embrace given the mainstream standard of beauty. Curly Nikki is one of the first "natural" hair blogs/ online communities that I've stumbled upon and I find it to be fairly positive. I've been "natural" sense last August, which basically means that I made the decision to not put harmful chemical hair straighteners, a "relaxer", in my hair anymore and instead embrace my natural curls. The website inspired me. It's been a journey, and the website is an awesome place to read about other women's hair journeys and get some hair advice and product reviews!

So, yes! I think... I will keep it to here for part one! After all, who says I have to share EVERYTHING I'm into now in just one blog? Writing this has helped me to realized that I have more things that I've been checking out lately than I thought. I hope you enjoyed this blog and that you will tune in later and allow me to share more things with you in the future. Until then, all links are in red, and grace and peace to you!

Love,

Rachel

"Oh snap!" she thought as she found some photos from last year.

I didn't have a very great day yesterday. I had woken up feeling bitterly down and remained that way for much of work here at the intersection of Kensington and Alleghany. Somewhere during the day however, it occurred to me that I still had two rolls of film in my backpack that I had meant to take someplace to get developed. It occurred to me that the Walgreens around the corner had a one-hour photo service, so I decided to drop my rolls of film and one survived the process.

My day was brightened by discovering these photos that I had taken just about a year ago. I have other photos, but I wanted to share ones from my time at the Wild Goose Festival, including the pretty snazzy double exposure of my dear friend Joel. I also got some snaps of Aaron Weiss with David Wimbish and the Collection. Last year was an adventurous summer and getting to see these pictures made me wish that I had started taking photos with my beloved analog cameras when Mission Year began.

 Definitely something I wish to do more often.

Peace be with you,
~Rachel

this is about the possibility that love might be at the center of the universe and that that love is worth trusting in.

I've been experiencing a lot of ups and downs the past few months. Mission Year has been tough, especially living within community. More than volunteering at Esperanza. More than reaching out to the community. These past few months have been causing me to grow up and out of old dead places in which I've spent so many years lying in.

There are people saying that they see my growth.

They're proud of me. The word left their lips. "Proud."

It's hard for me to see that growth most days. My heart has been breaking a lot. It's also been crawling closer to the truth -- the ridiculous and often ridiculous but life-giving truth -- the truth being that, i, AM beloved. Somehow.

My friend, Joel, asked me one time, if the search for transcendent love affected much of my life. And, I thought to myself "Of course." "OF COURSE DUH" I think, it does for most of us. Maybe all of us.

///

I've been thinking how important it is to remember that Jesus is a person, not an idea to be debated, a mantra to be recited, an ideal to live up to, or a figure stuck behind Mexican candles and rosaries... but a person. He's a someone I can relate to. There was a man who lived and breathed one day and wandered obscure towns upon the earth, trying to love people the way G-d, the Creator of the Universe, intended for all of us to be loved. Experiencing that love for myself and being able to imagine, believe and then sit in his love is changing me. It's causing me to hope for better things.

My heart is melting despite her constant breaking lately.

When it breaks, it threatens to freeze back up again, into the jadedness, conforming to the same irritable "you're stupid, Rachel!" and "nobody cares about your shit, Rachel" that I'm used to hearing in my brain.

When I think about the love that man embodied in light of my life... when I think about the way he would respond if he were in my shoes... when I remember the promises that I will never be left by him... when I see the way the people who love him light up and love in their broken sincerity and honesty....

my heart melts.

///

Sometimes, I look back at the past eight months and I notice that it wasn't what I thought it would be. I thought that by doing Mission Year, I would know what to do with my life. I thought I would narrow down the thousand passions raging in my heart down to one or two that I could allow to sail my life. I thought I would finally know what to go to school for. I thought I would find my place and my people.

Maybe I'm a little closer to those things now, but I think more than anything, I'm learning about who I want to be. I don't want to be sad anymore.
It's okay to be sad. It's okay to cry.
But, I don't want to lie in a pool of my tears.
If any tears, I wish that they could water the world around me and cause something beautiful to grow in my life.
I don't want a stagnant, un-moving bucket of tears in my life anymore. I don't want to drag around in the weight of my tears.

Life, life that is really life, is worth fighting for.
Love, love that is really love is worth trusting in.

I don't understand much of the mysteries of the universe (maybe multiverse!), and neither do I intend to know them all. I think the biggest mystery of all is there might be Love at the center of this thing at all. I think that's what that man suffered to prove.

That G-d is love.

///

P.S. I'm sorry that I've been so silent lately. There are many of you that I have wished to write or to call or see. I've been the opposite of brave and the opposite of encouraged a lot of times, but, I hope that you will forgive me, and that maybe, we can engage in having some sort of relationship again.