But then came Sunday and I saw his face. I saw his face and I teared up just looking at him. I realized that if I had to tell him I would have to tell him that no, the children didn’t do anything bad, no they weren’t anywhere that is usually unsafe. They were children like him who went to school on an ordinary day. I saw this boy’s face and I no longer felt capable of following guidelines of reassuring children that though bad things happen we live in a good world, that though the world is unsafe his family will always do everything they can to keep him safe. I knew that if I was his parent I wouldn’t want to engage in any of this reassuring, in any process of talking about what happened in Connecticut. I would just want to hold him and never let him go. Ever.

In conversation about this event I kept saying that my want for children had diminished and that seeing something like this happen, made me not want to have kids. Though in my mind this seemed logical, it wasn’t actually true. I still do really want children and a family. I feel almost close to guilt thinking about how I still want kids after knowing what could happen to them, knowing how little control I will have over their safety and well being. But then I think about why I want kids and a family. I want a family because I believe that true wholeness is found between people, that feeling whole, feeling complete doesn’t actually exist for an individual but exists in pieces that come together when people come together.  I want a family for the coming together and growing of wholeness that brings with it a glimpse of a collective wholeness. A wholeness that perhaps if nourished, grown, and worked on could prevent events like these from happening, that could promote a connectivity that leads to a true peace.

I have been shaking a bit lately. I know its not medical, I know its just me. Maybe it’s me finally admitting to myself how I am not complete or whole. I need people, because people need people. I want my own family, for a chance at a unit of wholeness. I will keep wanting this because I think there is hope for my children and that there is a chance that the world could get better and make room for them that isn’t interrupted by horrific violent acts.

I am not ready to be the first person, the one who has tell a child about what happened in Connecticut. But maybe I never will be, maybe no one is ever ready for that, as we all have hope that something like this won’t happen to us, to the people we love, to anyone. We have hope in a possible wholeness. I hope, I pray, that while we continue to feel the suffering of others that we continue to feel a hope for wholeness that made up of units and small pieces stretches and expands far beyond any of us into something greater.

Her beat beats through the meals made from neighbors, through and from carved out gardens, planted trees, washed clothes, and open arms. Her beat beat compassion. Compassion that fought through the rudeness of some truck drivers, the ridiculousness of officials, and the greed of them both.

Her compassion beats through a madness of chaos and lack of resources. Comes out beating a beat that builds the best faith. The best hope. Faith that comes from a non-sensical piece of ground, but comes through anyway, allowing for those unwarranted acts of kindness.

Beating to a song on repeat. Beating along with a laugh that rises from both a Malawian and a foreigner’s belly.Beating so strong it hints at and pokes at that somewhat hushed Malawian pride. The love of being Malawian. The love of knowing where your from. The love of knowing what grows in the soil and how. The love of knowing that neighbor, that one you have always known.

Beating to the ridiculousness of Peace Corps volunteers and all their thoughts that so intensely rise when grouped together. Beating to that being together and even better, the beat of feeling so together. The beating of all those anxious hearts that at some times want to beat with Malawi’s heart, and at other times would like nothing more than to beat a million miles away.

Regardless of the beat my heart beats now, what a privilege it was to feel and be able to match my heart, my own rhythms and beats, to one of such surprising strength.It is always a privilege to be able to beat with another heart,and an exceptional privilege to be allowed in on a rhythm of a country.

Standing in front of the mirrors proud that I didn’t forget my mat, towel, or water. Delighting in my pink yoga mat. Delighting in the fact that my t-shirt, finger and toe nails, all matched the pink rectangle on the wooden floor.I realized that though I didn’t forget to coordinate my outfit with the mat, I had forgotten my breath.

I felt shallow. In all senses. I felt like the girl who had so carefully put herself together to look as if she did yoga, but actually had no idea what it actually was and felt no desire to know. Not only did I have all the materials, all the accesories,they all looked good. I looked good. I was convincing. But I couldn’t breathe.

Though everyone around me may have had un-manicured toes that didn’t match their mat, they all had their breath. They were all excellent at it in fact. With each new pose their breathing rhythm never broke. Strong from the beginning, their breath was grounded, effortless. If it hadn’t been for me, our room might have contained one breath,one deep, measured, breath made of many.

But I have confirmed that I am horrible at breathing. My breaths were and are shallow. Often I couldn’t even really catch them. As in many yoga classes we were instructed to breathe through all the poses. When something was difficult or we had to hold a pose we were again told to try breathing through it, to concentrate on the breath. I did concentrate on the breath, but I found it tangled. The instructor talked about emptiness, letting things go, not being afraid of having empty spaces. Maybe part of the problem was not enough of me was emptied out. My breath felt as if it had to careen and sneak by so many things, so many filled spaces, so many thoughts, emotions, anxieties.

Regardless of whether my breath was caught on anxiety or entangled in sadness I realized that I haven’t really been breathing. Even tucked away in child’s pose immobile and calm, I knew my breaths were inferior to the ones being breathed next to me. I think in that moment I created even more sadness and anxiety for my breath to avoid and wriggle around. It squeezed itself through found empty crevices, wanting room to spread out and move.

Maybe thats my problem. Maybe I am thinking I have to solve all these inner road blocks. But maybe I just have to train my breath to cut through it. To cut through, forge ahead, provide a breath that can cut through any emotional or other sort of turmoil. Cutting through, knowing that it is a force, a connector, a part of one, one breath.

But, as any beaded bedroom door should be, it was short lived. The beads and all their character, their tackiness, soon gave way to a door. Though we started to value our privacy more, our room in some ways, still looked as if it could have a beaded door. It was an insane collection of colors, creatures, and designs. Our ceiling was painted in swirls and creatures, all of them hesitantly situated around our fan that over the years remained with only two blades. Even though our beds were bunked, the room was still quite small and filled with dressers and desks covered in candles, clutter, and an occasional printed cloth.

Our room was insane. An insane burst of Murphy Girl heightened when our alarm clock would blare either the Roots or the Monsoon Wedding song track moving us on our way to High School.

But the beds are un-bunked now and occupy separate rooms. The ceilings and floors are off-white covering up fish and bad poetry all written and drawn on our turquoise walls. Clutter has been removed and a bareness has settled over the house, warning visitors that no one truly occupies this space anymore. The house, its occupants, are all in transition.

One of my friends was telling me over breakfast about how her mother has a custom where she makes my friend change her sheets right before she leaves her house to go back to school or her apartment. She sleeps in them one more night and her mother leaves them on the bed till she comes back. She leaves the sheets slept in by my friend, so she’ll come back, so she’ll come back to her bed, so she’ll come back home.

When I arrived home from the airport, there was a just a comforter on my bed for show. No sheets. I grabbed a second comforter and slept on the first with a second on top. I could put on sheets, but perhaps it makes sense that there are none, because I am probably not coming back to this bed, this room, this house.

It may fit better to say I grew up in Malawi. I grew up after surviving life, projects, and much alone time, in a rural African village. Of course growing up is a process that is many pronged. Langston Hughes says that ‘Love is a growing up’ and Virginia Wolff says that ‘Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others.’ Maya Angelou makes some reference to how most people never grow up, they just age. Perhaps that is what I did in Malawi, a little bit of growing up, but mostly aging, thinking I could make home anywhere if I could carry my own water and build a fire. But really what I grew was more character, a little bit of muscle, and skill.

Sleeping, or trying to sleep in my old room, I felt growing pains. I grew a little bit when I realized that the creatures were painted over and that I probably won’t paint anymore creatures on ceilings. I grew more when my bunk bed was disassembled and I had no desire to re-assemble it. I grew even more when I realized I would probably fall down and grow up with each new love.I grew knowing how growing can be loving and knowing and losing it all and starting again. Painting over and painting anew. Growing to survive all those disassmeblings that make way for new assemblings. Growing up to grow on.

Not the case. Instead of men and women in their business wear grabbing paper cups of caffeine and bags of muffins, instead of parents rushing back to the car filled with kids, all the kids are here, underfoot. Having their muffins cut up and hot chocolate portioned out to cool it down, they wriggle about in their chairs and on the floor. They fill tables and floors ecstatic to not only be out of the house but to be eating whipped cream off hot chocolates and cream cheese off bagels with their dad sitting beside them wiping off that whipped cream that somehow made it onto his weekend fleece pullover.

Becoming more accustomed to my surroundings, I soon realized that the melodious hum was coming not from a child exactly, but from a rambunctious small lion with a fleecy brown coat, scraggly mane, zippered back, and inconceivably small Tevas. She and her partner in crime (dressed in street wear) where zipping around tables and chairs lightly laughing and making their whir of hum presumably to keep the world spinning and the universe going. Lost in hums and wearing a look of surprise at the café’s weekend transformation, I reached the point where some young attractive guy in line wants to commiserate about the sudden emergence of tiny people seemingly already somehow caffeinated.

Alas, though it might be in my best interest to commiserate and perhaps even flirt, I have already become lost. Not only am I ready to scoop up the small lion in Tevas and either hum or roar, I am afraid I have already imagined that I have children I need to attend to. At this point in a pre-coffee state its very possible I will walk up to a Prius and try to get in, routing out the best way to get to that little league game. Its possible that I crazily start writing to do lists that include laundry not my own, and scheduling things like play dates. I might also end up buying cookies and muffins with whimsical names for my children who await my arrival at home. I might even go as far as to find a Whole Foods happily pursuing the aisles for healthy snacks and treats, scheming what family dinners should be for the week.

Eventually I am hit with my actual reality, come to realize my coffee mug is full, I should start walking home, the cute guy in front of me has left, and for some reason I am holding a small paper bag containing three hummingbird muffins. Nothing left to do but take a bite, walk out, and hum.

Often as a Unitarian Universalist I struggle with creating my own prayer space, a space Muslims create anywhere facing a certain way, five times a day. I struggle to find a spiritual home or a sense of ritual outside of church (if I am in fact going to church at all). I find within a spiritual sphere I look for a home, a found grounding and sacredness where one can hear and be heard. But I have yet to find how to sustain this space or be able to find it continually.

The other week I went to a UU service here in Seattle, where my sister is working and living. The service turned out to be more of an info session about the annual UU General Assembly summit in Arizona and less of a cohesive, spiritually based sermon. While discussing the GA theme of immigration, many participants mentioned the need to feel the suffering of others in order to feel the suffering of the world. Congregants commented on the idea that all of our liberation and freedom is tied together. But no one was able to pin point how this is achieved. How people come to a place of true empathy, how people get to a place where they feel compelled to fight for a freedom not their own, out of feeling the suffering this lack of freedom has created. I know that everyone could identify the suffering of many and some even act on it, but how do people come to a place where they truly feel that suffering, where they feel it in a way in which it feels and becomes their own?

Hungering for a sermon, more cohesion and direction, I started to think about prayer. Prayer as a way to feel empathy that’s not always possible to reach through personal connection. I considered the need for prayer. I considered the comfort I felt to hear the call of prayer from a different religious tradition than my own. Perhaps part of feeling the suffering of others in a real way asks to be felt through a channel similar to prayer.

Many find that they can be empathetic when they establish a personal connection. But the suffering of the world extends beyond the amount of people you can know, affect, and love. Since this task is impossible, the task of establishing connection with all who suffer, maybe it could be done in prayer. A both active and spiritual approach of communication to an unsure end, but a desired one nonetheless. A way to be able to route yourself to a place of true empathy, praying for the courage to feel someone else’s pain however far removed.

In order to fully love and connect, I think it is necessary to try and feel the suffering of the world, acknowledging that all of it can never be fully felt. In order to acknowledge this, in order to make room for love, we should work on constructing home between people, homes where suffering can be expressed and love can build up. A continuous prayer of creating, building, sacrificing, for people in pursuit of building up many homes that belong connected and linked. Creating communion that allows for both the difficult and the good, between people and what is created between them. A prayer for home that is creating, that is requesting, that is building home with people outside those classic lines of communication. Praying to feel suffering, praying to feel its end, praying to be a part of that end.

Praying home.

Most woman feel confident when they feel beautiful. The luckiest of brides feel a certain type of confidence that stems from knowing that someone believes your radiance is beyond beauty. And you believe them. The night after the fitting, between bites of delicious and amazing grilled hen, polenta, and pasta, my friend told me how happy she was to get married. Earlier, she and I had been talking about the concept of home, a concept I often touch on in this blog. Standing in her soon to be perfected gown, she radiated that bridal glow. But it wasn’t just the elegant bodice of the dress holding her up, it was a clear sense that she was soon to start out to find a new home with someone she already felt at home with, someone she loves. The best type of bodice is one that allows you to move, to live in a space that feels like home. Such a bodice provides support amongst people where home exists. This home can be found in an ever changing process comprised of searches, re-locations, journeys, hunting for somewhere to work from, love from, and search from again. 

In one of the million and one romantic comedies I have seen, a character mentions that couples often get married when they run out of things to say to each other. In this same generalized vein, I would argue that instead, couples get married because they know they have so much more to say to each other and can’t wait to hear and to listen. I love when couples remark that their partner is their rock. I find in the best of cases, this means they are someone who truly listens and is always there to understand the other. One becomes a support to stand by, and know how to love continually because you have listened. This particular bride, I happen to know will always be part of that listening and loving, a part of that home that holds you up, that home you will always be loved in whether in a white dress or not. 

These are not the desserts that ‘melt in your mouth,’ these are the desserts that melt you. “Hot Cakes” describes its own creation as a ‘smoked chocolate cake, roasted mallow, graham and dark caramel.’ I wager instead: love defined. Ok fine, love may have other things attached, that are not edible or caramel per se. I offer an ode to this cake: a tiny volcano of chocolate, when released by fork spills out decadence complimented by a rich, velvety caramel. This caramel is only rivaled by a mountainous and perfectly roasted cube of marshmallow perched both regally and loyally by the side of its chocolate volcano, in all her royal pride. But that’s not the end, sitting warmly between cake and marshmallow, two rectangles of homemade graham layer a final ground of texture to the ooze of dream volcanoes. 

Eating this desert is like eating a S’more that grew up, fell in love, and reached ultimate happiness with the comforts she had always known and loved. Worthy of licking the plate, worthy of hunting down the chef, worthy of the cash spent, and gasp! worthy of the calories. My love for this desert has prompted me to couple it with a phrase of the infamous Tracy Jordan from 30 Rock. I love it so much “I want to take it behind a middle school and get it pregnant”. really. 

Somewhat by accident, maybe partly by instinct, maybe we did actually just know and it wasn’t by accident at all. But at the same time in the time of bunk beds, curl dips, and stuffed animal jungles, Eliza and I both discovered that we had both started to pray.

If I remember correctly we knew when for several nights there would be times when one of us would start talking and the other wouldn’t answer and then roughly a few minutes later the previously unresponsive one would respond having finished her bunk-bed-pillow prayer. Oddly placed blank spaces in our nightly chats finally prompted one to question the other. We talked about our different ways of prayer. I was, and still sometimes am, consistently afraid of covering all my bases. I used to start all my prayers along the lines of “To all humanity, to all people, to the spaces between people, to god, to gods, to goddesses, and all that is it out there.”

My prayers have changed a lot since then, I don’t know if Eliza still prays, and if they have changed from what she used to say in her head from the bottom bunk, but I miss that. I miss someone knowing my silence, and having their own. People when they pray together make a sacred space and I miss our silent and sacred space. A space that acknowledges the unknown, while sensing a known amongst each other. A space that knows fear, but also a space that knows there is something greater out there that isn’t fear and that exists beyond fear. Eliza and I on our road trip were talking about the transitions and the rough times the transitions had brought. Interspersed between this talk was me getting silent and Eliza looking over, squinting her eyes and saying ‘Jo…. what are you thinking about?’ knowing exactly what I was thinking about. I would laugh a little or sigh both often coupled with some tears. It felt like we were both back in a prayer. A prayer where we both, through each other, were praying to some outside force that was between us, but was unknown. For that moment caught up in a piece of prayed hope and change, I remembered the needed feeling of bunk bed prayers and the luckiness of still being a part of that space.

Shiva was still actively destroying the universe in my mind when the flight took off, and I was hopeful when they mentioned their meal service would begin after we reached our cruising altitude. But disappointment was soon to set in. Their ‘meal service’ consisted of free drinks and a food cart where you had to purchase your meal. And there was no Hindu option vegetarian or not, to purchase, just chips, raisins, and hershey bars, as if Shiva with all her burning passion would want to eat any of that. Lamenting this fact the plane started going through some turbulence. I used to be horrible on planes. I feared them with a mighty fear that made my hands sweat and grip the arm rests. It just continually seemed so unlikely that this giant hunk of metal could be so high in the sky, especially without flapping any wings. But I have flown so much now, that I just can’t use up all that fear, so I have gotten a lot better, no more waves of nausea, sweating palms, or hyper ventilating, just a few nervous glances up to the head of the plane when we go through turbulence.

But this flight I didn’t even give the pilot a glance. Maybe it was the mood I was in or perhaps a new chapter in my relationship with planes, but I kept thinking about how if there was a Malawian sitting next to me they would probably say “well, if the plane is going to go down, its going to go down.” And that’s how I felt. But the guy diagonally across from me seemed to be feeling differently. He was gripping his armrests just as I have, he was trying desperately to distract himself, switching between reading and writing, and every time we went through another pocket of turbulence he would rip the earbuds from his ear, ready to hear the pilot say “well folks, we’re going down, please keep your seatbelt low and tight around your waist, and pray to whoever is going to get you through.”

I all of a sudden smiled and almost started laughing when I realized that all I wanted to do in that moment was to take the seat next to him, grab his hand, and say “Would you like to share a Hindu Non-Vegetarian Option with me?” In which he would respond “no, thank you”, because when you are a nervous flyer you just want to drink, not eat, so after he would say “no” I would say, “Its going to be ok, I know this because I am ok even after always wanting someone to grab my hand on an airplane, and no one ever doing it, I now don’t even fear airplanes and it was just time nothing else, but now you have someone holding your hand, so your safety is guaranteed, and you will fear less soon.” He would then smile and say “thank you.” And then probably think in his head “That girl had the biggest white fro I have ever seen and I have no idea what she is talking about”

This didn’t happen, as I didn’t make my move, though I blame the lack of Hindu Non-Vegetarian Option. But sometimes it is nice to convince yourself even if just for a plane ride, you can be ok.