be in love with yr life: a goal

I’ve blocked myself.

It’s not writers’ block, some mysterious mental sludge that I have to wait to drain away, or just be less stressed out, or eat healthily, or what have you.

I’ve been keeping a blog since I moved to El Salvador, for whatever reason. Writing things helps me see my thoughts outside of myself, and it’s been important to share some of those with the people who loved me through the first twenty-two years of my life before sending me off, some more begrudgingly than others, into the rest of it.

When I came out to my parents, finally, a year ago, the pool of things about my life that we can talk about shrinked down to a puddle: am I healthy, what is the weather like, what am I making for dinner. And the pool of things other people are to know about me evaporated almost totally.

So I shut up a year ago, and I’m over it now.

Mev is the reason I’m here at all, quite frankly. She went with me to Nicaragua when I was a jaded twenty year old and held my hand as I remembered what God whispered to each of us as she walked with us silently out of the night: that she waits for us all to find her in the underside of history. I’ve met so many people along the way that remind me of the women Mev met writing The Struggle Is One, and I’ve lent out and exchanged around my copy of her gospel so many times that I no longer know where it is. It seems appropriate that she be the reason I start reaching out my closed up little heart roots.

So my writing project for this class is to write on my blog again. Whoop de doo. But like, my grandma used to read it to her Sunday school group at Wendy’s over junior bacon cheeseburgers after church. It gave folks at home words to ask about more than the temperature and what-is-that-in-Fahrenheit. It was my self-inflicted open heart surgery on the world wide web, and I stopped part way through. I don’t want to wait until it’s healed up in pieces to try to put it back together.

Probably it will be a lot of like, see-judge-act, talking about stuff that goes on here or there and talking about what God seems to say in all of it. A lot of leaving crumbs along the trail of my own processes, so I can see where I’ve gone. US foreign policy, food sovereignty, corn, pianos, public busses. The price of tomatoes, Anita’s son’s days. The forecast, the full moon, Celsius-to-Fahrenheit.