It is Sunday. I am at the kitchen table, wondering what to do next. I feel tired and want to go back to bed, yet I don’t. I look out the windows and see the snow softly floating down and don’t know whether to be ironically amused or ticked off. Today, I had wanted to plant pansies at my office to make that space more inviting. I wanted to be able to pull up in front of the office and feel happy first thing, rather than looking at the dead grass, the weeds and all the cigarette butts and shattered beer bottles. The area in which my office is located is not the happiest place on earth – surrounded by a hip-happening Irish bar, a not-so-exciting CPA, an underground gambling ring, an Asian market and a drug testing facility. It’s an odd combination of humanity those locales draw. Most of them are indifferent to honoring another’s space.
However, it is snowing. No planting of pansies today.
And, as I sit here, thinking about yesterday’s post I am listening to Sounds of the Sabbath which is bouncing reverently around the living room. One of my all time favorite hymns fills the air…
Where Can I Turn for Peace?
(Hymn #129)
Where can I turn for peace?
Where is my solace
When other sources cease to make me whole?
When with a wounded heart, anger, or malice,
I draw myself apart,
Seaching my soul?
Where, when my aching grows,
Where, when I languish,
Where, in my need to know, where can I run?
Where is the quiet hand, to calm my anguish?
Who, who can understand?
He, only One.
He answers privately,
Reaches my reaching
In my Gethsemane, Savior and Friend.
Gentle the peace he finds for my beseeching.
Constant He is and kind,
Love without end.
As I child, I was taught that God was outside of me and love came to me, from outside of me. Those most cherished “things” were way far outside of me, sometimes even “up there” and that, somehow, I was supposed to “do” something to earn them both. There was a juxtaposed belief that it was my divine right to have both, yet, I had to “be” good to do so. It was conditional.
Now, as an adult and far removed from the religion of my upbringing, I am trying to find my own truths, rather than ride into heaven on my dad’s coattails. I am confused. The messages coming to me frequently are, “You just gotta love yourself, Ang. The love comes from the inside.”
I have no frame of reference for this way of thinking. It is so foreign to me. Love has always been something that has come at me and, when it came from me it went to someone else, someone outside of me. In ALC, the facilitators have a little hand gesture they do to show what they mean – they point outward and then slowly sweep their pointing finger inward toward their chest to signify “bring it inward.” I see the move. I do the move. I just don’t understand what it means.
Where do I turn for peace? I no longer know. I feel like I am wandering in a desert. Alone. Without a tribe. I feel very alien in this world… and am achingly aware that this aloneness is creating more aloneness. I long to connect, yet the message is I need to do that for myself first. If I want to connect with others, yet I have to do it for myself first and that doing it for myself first is an absolutely foreign concept which I do not understand… well, then… what the hell? I feel trapped in this desert, destined to wander alone because I don’t know how to love myself first.
