Lakeside Candle & Soap Company

There are candles burning at my bedside tonight. The window is ajar so that I can hear the rushing wind. What a stormy season in San Diego. James Taylor is singing about Carolina and my mind is wandering. It takes me back to another stormy season - two, maybe three years ago. High school, I drove to the Lakeside Library and laid outside in my white Tacoma, Milly, reading, parked under the pepper trees. A wandering spirit overtakes me when it rains. I wandered that day, climbing trees and talking to strangers. My restless feet took me down the street, past the post office and into the Lakeside Candle and Soap Co. on the corner of Woodside and Main. I meandered through, touching everything, smelling some, talking to Bobo, the parrot who occupied a man-sized cage in the corner. I was enjoying fairy illustrations on some greeting cards when the tallest man I've ever seen stepped in from a back room and introduced himself as Tomas (TOH-mas). He was around thirty-five with broad shoulders and a disproportionately small head. We shook, his massive hand engulfing mine. Over the next hour, Tomas told me his story - how he had dressed as a monk for a book report in elementary school earning him his nickname (what his real name was, he wouldn't say) and about his two-year-old daughter. We talked about God and about Lakeside and about my literary aspirations. I bought a candle that day; round with a colorful, stained-glass pattern. I went back to visit Tomas twice after that. His shop closed before the end of the subsequent summer. But that candle is burning on my table this night, and I am thinking about that stranger who is, in a way, my friend.

"Everywhere, in every town, in every street, we pass, unknowing, human souls made great through love and adversity."

-Frank Borzage "Street Angel"

Maybe I don't want to be Bohemian afterall

The Day - October 26, 2010
The Place - Santa Barbara City College
The Moment - the most confused of my entire little existence.

Thoughts are danger. Not an hour ago I seriously considered turning on a TV show, getting on Facebook, and rotting my brain into mush so that it would just go quiet. There is something desperately appealing about being a lemming; no worries, no internal struggle, no decisions. But that's no way to live. A sentient person cannot just live in the system without questioning its validity. I have, unfortunately, encountered too many sentient people to allow my brain to atrophy in such a manner.
I try to spend my Tuesday evenings on State St. at the farmer's market where a group of anarchists have a table to raise awareness and funds for a worker-owned worker-run coffee shop that they want to call Bonfire Cafe. There is one in particular who I love to ask about the things he believes. His name is Zach and he seems to be the unofficial head (being, of course, anarchists there is no official head). This boy is a little older than me and so much more informed. It may well be that his information is crap, but he knows more of it than I do of truth. He is an honorable human being. He's wrong. But his spirit, the bit of God in him, is dying to make things right; it is a spirit that remembers Utopia, that remembers Eternity, and he is trying so hard to make that here. His methods and his politics won't work - if only because he is wrong about innate human nature. But his motivating beliefs are beautiful. He is looking for God - in that he is looking for freedom, for generosity, for justice, for compassion, for mercy, for basic human rights. He is looking for a world where people aren't hungry when there is food that no one is eating. A world where people aren't living on the street in front of empty buildings. A world where a few don't decide the fate of all. He is a tragedy. He thinks that he just wants to be left alone. If they would just stop trying to impose their (fill in the blank)... If there just wasn't a centralized group of elite executives ruling in their own interest... If we could just decided for ourselves how we want to live our lives... Oh Zach, how disappointed you'd be if you got your wish. You can't govern you. I can't govern me. People are not the creatures you so hopefully believe they are. Those morals that you don't like, they have to be there. They protect - they lovingly limit in order to protect. If you only knew the One who gave them to you.
He would not be of any real influence in my life if the above was all that there is. However, today he said things that pricked a sore spot in my heart. I know no better way to put it than this: some of his words crushed the Dan in me who keeps watch over the Darcy and she is running amuck inside my head. Dad has to be the most powerful part of my mind because Mom is not stable. She is a revolutionary. so easily inspired that she makes romantic even some of the ugliest men and barbarous movements in human history. He is a pillar of logic and knowledge and he remembers what he knows even in the face of the most powerful emotions. Balancing the two is my life's great challenge.
I wish I could quote what they boy said to me tonight. I can't do him justice. We talked for a half an hour or so at the end of which he got a little bit lost in his musings. He said that maybe none of the systems of the world are truly sustainable. Maybe it doesn't matter whether or not he can make his ideas last from one generation to the next. Maybe all he can do is fight to carve a niche in the world and make it as close to freedom as he can while he lives. Maybe all he can do is try one of the things that hasn't been tried yet. Try, at least, to make life different. And if he flies too close to the sun and goes down in flames, then he'll be either a lesson to those who come after or an inspiration.
The Darcy in me began to tremble. I left. And when I got around the corner and safely down the street, I sat down on a bench and cried. Never, at any intellectual crisis of my life, have I known the people I want to talk to to answer their phones. So I called on my God and cried some more. My insides are shaken and I don't know exactly what to do. I need to know more, I need to have more answers. What can I say to him, and to the others like him who have yet to become part of my story? I couldn't do it by myself in the first place added to which is a handicap deliberately set up by my Jesus.
"For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing... For it is written, 'I will destroy the wisdom of the wise; the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.'"
As Alicia would say... "What the world?"

The Break-Up: Epilogue

We were right to fall in love. He and I, children though we were, though we are, we were right. We didn't choose each other haphazardly. We knew that there was something to be found here that was nowhere else. It may have been foolishness, but it wasn't crazy. There was something to be found. We had a meeting of minds and hearts, in some ways. He couldn't go with me everywhere my mind went and he wouldn't go anywhere new or difficult. But he met me sometimes. "And I won't regret, because you can grow flowers from where dirt used to be."

Our Horror Unfounded?

Dear Friend, please do not take this post too seriously. Remember and believe that I will never leave the Island, never forget the way, and never become as ordinary as Jenkins minor. However, I think the terror to which we cling bears questioning. Consider the moment in Finding Neverland when George grows up. He worries about his mother in a very mature sort of way and J.M. Barrie says, "Magnificent. The boy is gone. Somewhere in the last thirty seconds, you've become a grown-up." He tells George that he should be the one to talk to his mother about her illness. George says, "But I don't what to say" and J.M. Barrie replies, "You'll do fine. You'll do just fine."

I live four hours away from the nearest grown-up who cares about me. And I'm doing fine. I'm doing just fine. Sometimes I am afraid and often am I lonely. But some days I walk around and think, "Gosh, this is sort of easy," and have to think real hard to remember what it was that I was afraid of. Be brave, friend. Bedford Falls is an imaginary place. Neverland is not. But neither of them can take us away unless we go there on purpose. You'll do fine, I promise.

Let's make a new place, a new way to be. Let's be betwixt-betweens, like Peter. We'll think like grown-ups and laugh like children. How about it?

A Total Eclipse of the Heart

I sat in a seat in a church, swallowed up by anonymity, thriving. Oneness in a room full of strangers, our hearts faced the same direction. It makes me tingle. In the silence that overtakes a room when a man prays, the train whistle sounded loud, just outside the walls, echoing in the done-over-warehouse acoustics. Somewhere in that hour my soul realized that ever elusive thought which mind has mulled over a thousand times; none of it is mine.
I possess nothing. That to which I cling with every last thread of strength and insist upon fretting over time and again does not belong to me. I have nothing. And yet I am unable to give this nothing up. The pictures of what is to come, what lays before me, they are not real and they are not mine. I claim ownership of nothing. Not even the illusions I struggle to grasp.
"So let Me have them."
"No, Lord," as my eyes begin to prick, "I can't." I did not give life to the people I love; I did not dream up the concept of them, nor did I shape them or even choose them for myself. They are mine to enjoy only by gift (though, I suppose, even the enjoyment does not belong to me for that too was gifted by Another). I have no right to anyone. They. Are. Not. Mine.
"So let Me have them."
Tears flow in earnest now and I literally stifle sobs for I know that I never can resist Him for long and before the end of the next hour I will be without every single thing I thought I had when I awakened just a little while before. What will I do without "my" dreams? MY face, MY hair, My brothers, MY fears, MY car, MY time... "Let Me have it." My composure barely held until the pastor finished talking. What am I saying? Composure abandoned me long before then. Quiet barely held that long. I squeezed my way through the packed row of seats, apologizing, and probably dripping tears on people. My bare feet protested the temperature of the floor. But then, they are not even really my feet, apparently, so what was I worrying about? I dropped to the floor in the front, literally unable to keep my face off the carpet, and sobbed.
I could not form the words. What evil lives in my nature swelled up into my throat and squeezed it shut. How can I let go? I know I don't actually control a damn thing. But oh the power of that illusion. If I let Him have them, He might take them. He might destroy everything. But He isn't a destroyer! The only thing I know in all this vast silly world is that His intentions toward me are good. "You can have it. You can have it all... Only promise me that what You say is true! Only promise me that You are who You say You are, and You can have anything You want. Anything."
But this place isn't everything. It isn't even anything. What is Bedford Falls? Fiction. Nothing more. A made up place. So what if I get wrinkly die? This that I am so frightened by is, in and of itself, nothing. I am not tied here. It does not end here. Childhood is not the end all be all of all things. It is not everything. It is not anything. Everything is what comes HereAfter. That is where I am tied. That is Neverland - the home of beauty, joy and neverty. I transcend this. That is now what is true. It always was, I am just to stupid to see sometimes.
I transcend this.

Unhappy Hello to my old Companion

Depression is like anesthesia that starts in one's extremities (fingertips, toes, ends of one's hair) and creeps so gently and slowly up one's veins, ever working its way nearer and nearer to one's heart. That creep is familiar to me and I become aware of it before it reaches my first knuckles, sometimes before it even leaves my finger nails. There is no stopping it; just the thought, "Hello Old Friend, how I loathe you." It makes my bones heavy. It urges me softly to sit still, to put my book down, not to answer my phone, not to move, not to think, just to sit perfectly still and do nothing. Even now, I force my fingers to move though they creak in protest. They are so weighty.
They say (whomever they may be) that Hope deferred makes the heart sick. Not that I had hope, really. But when a person such as myself builds up a fantasy and then real life feeds it with tiny tidbits, a person such as myself is unable to resist a small semblance hope. I never really had a chance. An interesting manchild paid me the slightest bit of attention and my made up world reeled. He is too much more muchier than I am. He has too many other options. He is more lively than a girl like me could ever be. I give up before I begin.

I feel it in the earth, I smell it in the air.

The whole world is different. I noticed it first a week and a half ago when a family who is usually striving and stressful became peaceful and emitted a spirit of harmony when plucked out of their daily surroundings and transplanted in the beauty of Santa Barbara. And then I looked around me and saw gentility, strength, passion, excellence, all the traits of God demonstrated in people. The world began to glow that gorgeous gold just like it does at my favorite time of day. I felt Love. And then I realized - it's me. I am glowing, I am different. I trace it back just a few weeks to the day I spent pouring through old photos looking for one of my Mama to take away with me. That day I remembered my child self; "little-I" as E.E. Cummings would put it. I remember that little girl and I fell in love with her. And then I remembered that she is me and in that moment I learned to Love me. "Love thy neighbor as thyself." I know this. But if it is really true then, until I know how to love myself, how can I love my neighbor? I have fallen in love with my own truest self and since that moment I have been loving. Oh the glory of Love! How many songs are devoted to it? What a life, to live in Love. Leave Romance out. Perhaps Love really is all you need. "If ever I loved Thee, my Jesus, 'tis now."