The world wants you
To be a tool for its use.
Refuse.
Hold your brokenness high.
Your bleeding wounds, lift up.
The pain, don't trade it for anything.
It is your living.
Do not fit in,
Especially when it costs you money;
Especially, especially, especially
When it costs you you.
Give up every happiness
To stay wild.
Give up everything
To love the one who sets you free.
what if you stop
feeling your love for me?
how will i breathe?
i will only breathe again
if i am reborn
but i want to stay
in this womb
but, no, you cannot
breathe for me
this fear is meant
not for your love
but for a divine one
When someone sees you as a god — a woman degrades herself because she sees you as the one who gives her value — the loving response always involves some sort of crucifixion. For the undignified woman, your own desires and any potential response which does not aim to restore her dignity must be killed, no matter how painfully, in such a way that her own dignity can be restored without shame.
The pain Christ feels is not because our sins hurt him. It’s because it hurts to see a beloved one degrade or afflict their self. In the crucifixion, he takes our degradation and affliction upon himself. That is the preferable pain when someone you love is hurting.
The powers of this world, through seemingly benign language, curse us.
Shaming and invalidating language can spread through songs, coworkers, neighbors, family members, movies, and just about any other medium. This kind of language is viral and toxic, and it works in the most sinister way.
Repeated phrases become repeated thoughts, repeated thoughts become repeated feelings, and repeated feelings become core beliefs. Even a common, seemingly harmless phrase can perpetuate a cycle of shame or distorted belief. Take, for example, this phrase from a popular Blink 182 song: “Don’t waste your time on me.”
In many cases, we apply no meaning to such a phrase. It’s just a catchy lyric that bounces around between our ears. But when our lived experience seems to line up with the phrase, when we’re wounded or hurt, the phrase takes on a certain life of its own and lives inside us, leeching our courage and disavowing our humanity.
When I say, “don’t waste your time on me,” it implies two terrible lies: one, that spending time on me is a waste of time, that spending time on a human being could possibly be a waste of time; and two, that the person spending time is not smart enough to use their time wisely, that they waste their time, and that time is a currency.
These lies promote a sense of shame, scarcity, broken relations, and, ultimately, untrue core beliefs. They are toxic.
They are spread through a single line in a simple song, a curse. And we have endless access to an endless number of very catchy songs, catchphrases, movie quotes, etc, with curses just like that one.
For our own mental wellness, for our own perception of reality, we must examine the language we use in our thoughts and in our speech.
The phrases we think, listen to, and speak are healthiest when they support positive social interaction; acknowledge the full dignity of every human person; promote a realistic sense of abundance, especially of the abundance of love; express emotion and experience with integrity, courage, and honesty; encourage ourselves and others to bear challenges and sufferings; inspire wonder by asking questions without demanding answers; and thank, praise, and glorify God, The Good Father.
But we don’t need to worry about a list of phrases that are okay or not. We only need to “think of what is above, not of what is on earth.” (Colossians 3:2) We only need to dispose our attention toward God, love, and virtue. Then, we will find freedom from the curses that the powers of this world place upon us.
“Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”
Romans 12:2
The following was originally part of a novel I’m working on. In the editing process, I realized it didn’t fit there, but it still seemed worth sharing, so here it is.
I used to hate people. Then I figured out why. I still hate them sometimes, but I am mostly able to overcome it now.
I hated people because I thought people hated me, or at least didn’t care about me. And I thought my value was dependent on what they thought of me. And so I ultimately hated myself because I thought they hated me, and I thought that meant I was less of a human.
When I hated myself, I hated everyone else, too, because when we hate something, we hate what we perceive as flaws. My friend didn’t call me back, so he must not value me. Either he is flawed because he is wrong about me, about my value, or I am flawed because he is right about me, about my value. And so I hated. I hated flawed-ness. And because I hated flawed-ness, I hated human beings because human beings are flawed.
You know how that cycle of hatred is broken? I’ve only found one way: forgiveness. You can hate or you can forgive. If you hate, you turn whoever you hate into something less than human in your mind. You reduce them to an object and then throw it away. If you forgive, you love, and if you love, you give your attention.
I hope that makes sense. It’s important to me. It changed my life. Forgiveness isn’t easy, but it’s really the only way out of hate in a world full of flawed beings.
Forgiveness doesn’t mean, “you can do whatever you want to me.” It means something more like, “I refuse to see you as an object, to strip you of your humanity. I will see your flaws and still recognize that you are a whole person, so much more than your flaws.”
I have to remind myself about forgiveness quite often. It’s so easy to fall into hate. But it’s so much better to struggle to love.
This animal, as smart as a machine, watches the whole world with a few slight twists of its neck, yet never loses sight of the carrion.
It perches atop a nicked, scuffed, bright orange traffic cone; another of man’s inventions that wail out over all the rest of the natural world.
The crow doesn’t care. But I do. Why do we insist on maximums? Why are we so loud? And where is the place untouched by hype? I want to go there.
I am not at home here, among man’s inventions and machinations. I am at home where nature is observed, not trampled. I am at home among lovers, not CEOs. I am at home where freedom reigns, not frictionless transactions.
Carrion belongs to scavengers. I carry on.
I deleted the weather app from my phone. Then I got caught in a storm. But that was the point. I wanted to be surprised. I wanted to rebel against our modern tendency to control and predict everything.
Prediction, especially if it’s accurate, gives us a sense of control over something by taking away its ability to surprise us. We try to love the wild, unpredictable world, but only on our own terms. We try to control what is not meant to be controlled. But true love and deep relationships, whether with a person or with nature, cannot exist under the weight of conditions and control. The myth of Davy Jones and Calypso (Pirates of the Caribbean) expresses this painful truth.
Calypso, the goddess of the sea, and Davy Jones, a mortal sailor, fell in love.
Calypso rewarded Davy Jones by giving him the sacred task of ferrying souls who died at sea to the world beyond. Jones agreed to set foot on dry land once every ten years. If the love between him and Calypso was true, his task would be complete.
Calypso, like the seas, was fickle and unpredictable. After ten years, Jones went ashore, but she was not there. This meant Jones would have to ferry souls for another ten years. He refused.
Years later, when Calypso was imprisoned, the lovers finally met again.
Davy Jones approached her cell and said, “Ten years, I devoted to the duty you charged me. Ten years, I looked after those who died at sea, and finally, when we could be together again, you weren’t there. Why weren’t you there?”
“It is my nature,” said Calypso. “Would you love me if I was anything but what I am?”
As painful as her words are, they are beautifully honest. Only free things can be loved. Machines, things under our control, cannot. We can only truly love beings, and beings are unpredictable.
If we refuse to love a person unless they’re predictable, we’ll never love them. People are inherently unpredictable. And to truly love someone is to love them as they are.
True love is unconditional. The moment it becomes conditional, it ceases to be love, and instead becomes a transaction; I’ll give you my love only if you are predictable. True love is far greater. True love is given without any expectation of repayment or even the expectation that it will be accepted.
While Davy Jones’s story is a cautionary tale about conditional love, the ultimate example of unconditional love can be found in Jesus Christ’s Passion. Christ gave his life to redeem the sins of humanity without any expectation that humanity would accept this redemption. We’re entirely free to deny it. He knew many would deny it, and gave it anyway.
Davy Jones was the opposite. He ferried souls to the afterlife not as an unconditional gift to Calypso, but so that she would be with him. When she wasn’t there, he stopped ferrying souls. His “love” for her was closer to the love a client has for his prostitute. In other words, he didn’t love her. He was paying her for an intimate relationship by ferrying souls to the world beyond.
While it’s definitely not cool that Calypso didn’t hold up her end of the agreement, it also was against her nature to make such an agreement in the first place. And if Davy Jones had truly loved her, he would have loved her true nature, not her as he wanted her to be.
So, what does the weather have to do with all of this? Well, for one, we saw weather as fickle and unpredictable, like Calypso, until we developed meteorology. And like Davy Jones, we refused to accept the unpredictable nature of it. Instead of loving it as the living thing it was, we took away its ability to surprise us. We turned it into something that could not be loved.
By forecasting the weather, on-demand, we can be inflexible and unrelated to it. If it’s going to be hot outside, we can plan to be in an air-conditioned room all day, ignoring the heat. We don’t need to adapt as much. We don’t need to be surprised by it. We can, to a large degree, disconnect from the weather as it truly is; wild, natural, beautiful.
Of course, we can’t totally control the weather. We can’t make it rain. By avoiding the heat, we’re still reacting to the weather. But not as deeply, not as personally. We don’t have to go outside and look at the sky to guess if it might rain. We just look at some data on a screen.
It’s a subtle change in the relationship. But relationships are everything, and subtle doesn’t mean negligible.
There are different levels of relationship. One of the deepest levels is what sociologist Hartmut Rosa calls resonance. At its core, resonance is about the quality of our relationship with the world; whether with nature, other people, art, work, music, ideas, or even with ourselves. Resonance is a level of relationship that opens us to that sense of awe we feel when we really see a beautiful work of art or someone helping a neighbor in need.
According to Rosa, when we resonate with something, it calls us. But if we control a thing, then we cannot be called by it. It can only do what we allow it to do, and so it can never surprise us. And if it can’t surprise us, it can’t call us, and then we can’t resonate with it. We can’t relate to it on that deeper level. Instead of relating like lovers, we relate transactionally, like Davy Jones and Calypso.
Weather is a wild, living thing, but by constantly knowing what it’s about to do, we blind ourselves to its ability to surprise us the way a wild or living thing can. It’s a shallow way to relate to anything, but especially something as wonderful as the weather.
That’s why I deleted the weather app from my phone. Not because I’ll never look at a forecast again, but because I want to deepen my relationship with the weather itself. I want to be surprised by it. I want to resonate with it.
Davy Jones made the mistake of demanding certainty from something that was never meant to be certain. He only wanted love if he could predict its shape. But love, whether for a person or for the living world, is always given into mystery.
Weather is like that. It’s wild, fickle, alive. To stand in its presence without trying to reduce it to a chart or a number is to allow wonder back in.
We might get caught in storms, but we’ll also be caught by awe.
That, I think, is the better forecast.
