"a deep but dazzling darkness"

Life has me fragile, from things I don't know how to share with the people around me.  My heart has been tremulous, much like it was this time last year, but still quite different.  I'm stronger with the handling of the storms, maybe just because I'm less shocked, but more prone to depression.  I thought I was past it, the depression, but this week has me questioning that belief.  I'm going to share some things here, because I know I need to share them, some how, but I don't really have a way to do so with anyone I know right now.  I need to just speak in a place where no one feels like they have to have an answer.  Where it just is.

I work with kids, wonderful, amazing, kids that I love so much it makes me cry.  Regularly.  They come from all different background and homes, some with structure, some with none, some with love, some with very little or very confusing love.  All of these kids are the ones who fall into the margins of society.  All of them are fighters and lovers, precious people, who I know will stay as amazing as I know that they already are.

Here is where I'm a wreck; I don't know how to cope in this world.  That sounds so naive and pathetic, but I'm just trying to be honest, and I don't know how else to say it.  Everything I see breaks my heart.  Everything I hear these kids go through cuts me to the core.  This world is F'd up.  Their lives are F'd up.  And I don't want to ever become calloused to it.  I want it to keep hurting me, because it should.  This should hurt us all.  The fact that children are hungry or afraid to go home, that rape is not even shocking, that people are constantly give up on teenagers and tell them that they are no good and will never amount to anything, should cut and should hurt, and should make us break down and ask why.

In the middle of it all, I do fine, in the middle of helping, as small as what I do is, I have joy.  I see light.  I have peace.  It's when I get home that I feel it all falling apart around me.  It's a bit like culture shock every time I step through the door.  This world and job has me so wrecked for humanity that I don't know how to relate to my family right now, I'm not sure how to reach out to my friends.  I'm so fragile at home, after being strong and resilient all day, that any insensitive remark just blows me right over.  I bust into tears so easily that I've had to keep to myself most of the time these past few days, they don't understand.  And I fall apart whenever I try to explain.  And this is what has been the hardest, is trying to carry on with my own life after that.  Especially with the solitude that I know I can't bear.

This season of life has me so confused, nothing prepared me for it, or warned me of it's coming.  It feels almost like a second adolescence, a re-figuring out of what life is and how my soul fits in.  Trying to understand how I fit, how I live, how I have joy in this chaos and isolation.  I think just putting this out here will help some, actually.  To get it out a little more than in a poem or a journal entry, though I know this is reading much like a journal entry, and I apologize, if you've made it this far.  But thanks for reading.  I really do appreciate it.

So, I'll leave you with some quotes that have been helping me as I mull over them.

"One soul is as important as ninety-nine, worth leaving everything behind to rescue.  If there is one soul in your care, one face in your loving gaze, one hand in yours, then you are loving the world."

-Jesus Feminist by Sarah Bessey

"I saw Eternity the other night,

Like a great ring of pure and endless light,

All calm, as it was bright,

And round beneath it, Time, in hours, days, years,

Driven by the spheres,

Like a vast shadow moved, in which the world

And all her train were hurled."

"There is in God, some say,

A deep but dazzling darkness: as men here

Say it is late and dusky, because htey

 See not all clear.  

O for that Night, where I in hiim

Might live invisible and dim!"

-Henry Vaughan, 17th Century 

via A Ring of Endless Light by Madeleine L'Engle

Love, Clara