Wandering the savage garden…

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Hopes

I’m at an impasse.

I’m writing five hundred words a day, as part of a writing challenge, and I’ve reached what feels like a plateau.

I feel really awful about it, too.

The thing is, it’s making me question what I’m doing, and why I’m doing it.

The thought that started this train of thought (sorry for duplicate words, not editing!) was “if you write it, they will come.”

Well, I’m writing. And nobody’s reading. Nobody cares.

In the end, that’s okay; I’m not trying to write so that I can be loved, or appreciated, or glorified. (Or so I hope. I’m not comfortable with those things, but it’s hard to say from someone else’s perspective what my motivations actually are.)

But when I started this particular site, I did so because I wanted to write from a Christian perspective, and preserve those meager observations I had, in the hopes that someone, somewhere, would benefit from them, and through my efforts, God would be glorified.

(Okay, so maybe glorification was the point — just not my own. Again, such is my hope and my intent. I purposefully don’t use my name here, because I don’t want someone saying “That whatever his name is is a brilliant writer! I sure wish I was as talented as he is!” Likewise, my name not being here also means that nobody can throw toilet paper at my house in pure resentment. Everybody wins.)

But… like I said, nobody’s reading it. I’m not able to market it to increase readership, really (for a few different reasons) – I could, but I’d have to violate various terms of service for the social networking sites to do it well, and something about that rubs me the wrong way. I don’t want to say I’m someone other than who I am; my anonymity, in relation to this site, is precious to me.

So why am I doing it? Why try? The five hundred word challenge has its own merits, but realistically, I’ve been there and done that before; I used to have a job where I had to write at least three pieces a day, every week day, for years.

While I’ve lost the habit of writing on a daily basis (thus, this site having nothing published for seven months), at least I know that I can do it, and it’s just a matter of having a need. (Since I’d done it already, I feel often like I’ve had my exposure already; I don’t need to feel like people are reading me, since I know people did. Like I keep hoping, my goal was glorification of God’s Name, not my own.)

So here I am, plugging away, feeling hopeless in how I write, hoping that somehow, there’s something worthwhile being recorded for posterity. I’m trying to keep God in all of this, and maybe the hope I have in His Name is enough. I guess it will have to be enough.

savage
February 5, 2016
Lifestyle
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Being Satisfied

My first thought today, when I thought of writing, was about how dissatisfied I am with one of the simplest of things: my floor. I often sit on the floor to work and play, so it’s something that’s, well, always there.

Of course, the floor is always there regardless of whether you pay attention to it or not. (You’d… what? Float in space otherwise?) But I found myself thinking of it as a constant, and an irritant at that.

I’m not a fan of any flooring, I find. Stone floors are cold and hard; hardwood floors are warmer, but still hard; carpeted floors are softer, but that depends very much on the type of carpet and the padding underneath. I’m currently sitting on a shag carpet (I think?) — I’ve had a Berber carpet before, but that was less comfortable than this.

But this carpet isn’t especially comfortable either.

I don’t know if what I want is actually a sort of foam – like a Tempurpedic bed, I guess? But that seems ridiculous for a floor. When I think of it, I can’t help but see it as silly, laughable… and that’s exactly what it is. Maintaining such a floor would be a nightmare; walking on it would be exhausting. (Sleeping on it, though… but… that’s not what floors are for.)

The core focus for me, though, isn’t the floor. It’s my dissatisfaction with something that is, in the end, not negotiable; the floor will always be there, and as long as I like to sit on it for whatever reason, it’s going to be slightly uncomfortable.

The floor isn’t the problem. I am the problem. It’s my dissatisfaction with the floor, not the floor itself.

To be sure, my dissatisfaction is pretty mild – I’m not actually sitting here fuming about the floor. (I was sitting on it, and realized that I could write about the floor, and how I felt about it.)

But it got me thinking about other areas of dissatisfaction. I actually choose my level of dissatisfaction, largely based on my focus on things that shouldn’t really matter. Most of the things I’m not entirely happy with are things that I cannot control very well, and thus my dissatisfaction turns into a weight, a yoke.

I chain myself to problems with which there is no negotiation. That seems inefficient. In a lot of ways, it seems wrong.

God’s put me into a Creation that is marvelous beyond my ability to imagine; I see things almost every day that are amazing, even if they’re not understandable. (Why do people support Donald Trump? Or Hillary Clinton? Or Ted Cruz? Or Bernie Sanders? … but they do. And that’s amazing, even if I think it’s silly.)

It seems unfortunate to see even things like that as problems in the world that hurt my ability to appreciate the glory that God reveals on a regular basis. So maybe I can take my slight observation about floors and turn it into a decision to appreciate everything – including my floors – around me.

savage
February 4, 2016
Lifestyle
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The Anchor of the Past

It’s one of those days where I’m recognizing the value of writing as a habit, because I really, really don’t want to write, at all. It’s been a big day – great highs, and incredible lows. I’m still trying to process it all, and the thing that’s keeping me grounded is God.

I’m having to remind myself of the patterns we should follow through the day. They easily become rote and dry religion, but their true value is when they keep us afloat even when everything’s messed up around us.

Right now, everything’s messed up. Like I said, it’s been a triumphant day – and a difficult one, even in the height of victory.

It’s my own fault, too. The pain was lurking in the heart of success, and it was my own action that put it there; it was a random comment that set it loose. To the best I can tell, it wasn’t intentional, but it’s been severe, opening a wound that I thought had healed and scarred over.

So now I’m retreating, reminding myself that this is a storm that can and will pass, God willing, and that the routines I might otherwise despise for being empty ritual are also things that give us momentum and context.

I ask for forgiveness every day, which can easily become arrogance and ignorance… and when I need it, the beauty of the request shines through, breathing life into the dry bones.

Including my own dry bones. I don’t know how I’ll make it through this moment, but like I have done before, I will find a way, with God’s help and guidance, to healing. I know it won’t be easy; it’s redemption I seek, not simple forgiveness, and not an excuse.

That’s not to say that I don’t need to pray further about it. I try to be accountable in everything I do, because I don’t want an accusation to have legs; I want it to be obvious that the Accuser lies. And I resent the accusations, when the truth is told; “I am wronged,” I say to myself.

And I guess to some degree, I am wronged. The accusation is, in this case, not accurate. But that doesn’t mean that other accusations were also inaccurate – that’s why I know this is simply the long-buried fruit of sin from long ago. This is a burden I should bear, not one I should avoid, regardless of whether I wanted to avoid it or not.

In the end, it’ll be okay; I’ll endure, somehow, and with God’s help everything will be okay, and stronger than it was. Here’s hoping.

I realize that I haven’t actually written five hundred words, even though this is today’s “five hundred word” entry – I’m trying, but I’m really struggling right now.

savage
February 2, 2016
Lifestyle
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What does it mean?

A few days ago, I wrote a series of vignettes, in an attempt to try to represent my actual internal thought process/representational framework of thought – something I’d call a “paradigm,” but I don’t know if that’s the right word or not.

Basically, I wanted to take the way I think – a lattice – and try to write from that point of view, without translating it into a linear progression. I wanted to write the thought down, as I thought of it, more or less.

I can’t actually write it how I think it – it’s a flash of concepts, not vignettes. A boy, a raccoon; the vignette grows out of the correlation of the thoughts, and doesn’t serve as the thoughts themselves. If I were to write it, it would be a series of just words, largely unrelated.

They’re not actually unrelated, though.

That’s the thing about truth – it’s actually one vignette, one lattice of thought. It’s presented as a series of unrelated concepts: a boy and the raccoons that don’t know that the boy has claimed them; the girl with poor tools; the dog that feared airplanes; the grass that saw them all and did not care; the title of the post.

All contribute to the overall wave that the piece creates, and they’re all part of the piece. I wanted to write something true about truth, as I see it internally.

It’s not everything about truth; truth as a concept is greater than what I’d written (both to me and to the world, hopefully). Truth was presented as an absolute concept, in a set of subjective (and faintly maudlin) vignettes that tried to draw a shadow of what truth might be for a moment.

As such, I’m quite proud of it. I don’t think it’s great, per se – I can’t see it taking over the Internet – but it’s closer than I’ve gotten in a while. Even when I journal, I try to keep it somewhat linear, because I want to be able to go back and use what I’ve written. The way “Truth” is written, it’s a one-way trip; if I record the heartstone memories in my head in a journal, I’d be able to recall the framework of that moment, how I felt, but not necessarily why.

Plus, I’m used to trying to translate my thoughts into linear “this, then that” form, because I used to write for a daily audience. I have kids; I have to teach them, too. Everything around me is linear; abandoning that construction mode violates my own habit of trying to translate things so the people around me can use them.

But I’m still quite proud of it; I think I learned something through the writing.

First, that I could do it – on two levels. One level was the simple fact of writing, because I was tired and not feeling very well; I didn’t want to write, so writing was a “win.” The other level was that I was able to write in something approximating my internal mode of thought, which I don’t do very often (as I’ve described.)

The other was that I think I saw something of how I see truth in what I wrote. Hopefully it’s there for someone else, too.

savage
February 1, 2016
Lifestyle
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