sorting it all out
Wow. It is safe to say that I am completely overwhelmed. I spent 4 days in Texas this week for the Transforming Culture Symposium, and it feels like all of the stuff bearing down on me before I left was lifted there, then came crashing down all over again when I returned. I have always been a little too ambitious for my own good, and a little too optimistic about what my mind and body can handle in a short period of time. Even so, the symposium was an incredible experience, and gave me even more ideas, connections, lovely new friends (hi seela!), and professional mentors in the fields which I am most passionate--art and Christian experience and thought. The exhaustion I feel today is completely worth it, but I am still exhausted all the same.
It was truly a near thing, me going at all. Everything has been arranged for quite a while, but the food poisoning decided to linger to an excessive extent. I spent most of Saturday night and Sunday in the hospital, in excruciating pain, hooked up to fluids and potassium and pain killers, while D read to me and dozed beside my bed. We're in the middle of Steinbeck's East of Eden, a stunning narrative of family, insight, cold-blooded contempt, and new life in California. It was a glorious escape, to enter this other world and take my mind off of myself, and the disappointment that I knew was coming. A dehydrated, pain-filled exhausted woman should not get on a plane, alone, and then rent a car in an unknown city. Or eat any Texas BBQ and coleslaw and beans and tex-mex. It was really heart-breaking.
I had resigned myself to staying home, and sleeping on the couch all day like I had been doing for 2 weeks already (coughing like crazy, exhausted, then barfing like crazy, exhausted). Nothing like force of habit. But I started to hope in the evening, and called my doctor and emailed some people to pray for me, for wisdom and healing. I'm not sure it was wise, necessarily, to go, but I really did feel so much better the next day, when my flight was supposed to leave. My sister helped me pack, I loaded up my absurd number of prescription drugs (it's like feast or famine here, pill-wise. I've opened the floodgates now!), bananas, crackers and applesauce (which the TSA inspected carefully, as it probably looked like some sort of gel explosive device in there with all my plugs for gadgets and my beat-up computer), and off I went into the Blue.
There was so much going on at the conference, I spent little time elsewhere or contacting friends. For that, I apologize because I know people were worried and didn't know what was going on. Even now, there are so many people I have not had a chance to contact and I'm just so tired. The weeks leading up to easter were really intense, as I had a horrible cough/cold, along with a big part in the Good Friday service planning--what amounted to pretty much an art installation of sorts in the new sanctuary of our church. I was privileged to use the space for the first time, before it was officially "opened," and it was so rewarding. Briefly, I'll describe what my part of the experience was:
There were about 7 people who were part of the planning for the service, which is usually a contemporary, experiential, sortof stations-of-the-cross thing each year. This year we organized it around the seven last sayings of Christ on the cross, and applying them in a personal way to the congregants, encouraging meditation on scriptures (especially prophecies) that elucidate Jesus' love and sacrifice, and ending on a hopeful, contemplative note. The "room" I was in charge of designing was the last one, with "It is finished," and "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit."
People moved through a corridor of hanging rice papers with deep-red ink writing on them. Scripture passages about the finished work of Christ, the sacrifices, the grace of God, and the veil of the temple ripping in two were on the paper sheets. Then, across a ripped curtain was written, "It is finished." People then passed through the curtain to the main sanctuary space, with scattered chairs about and low lighting, except on the cross and on a tree sapling on the stage. The cross was made from the trunk of a huge tree they had to cut down to build the new building, and it's a stark but beautiful piece framed by the alcoves on the stage. It almost looked like the mouth of a tomb, the way we lit it for the service.
From the base of the cross to the tree was a flowing red piece of fabric that looked like a river of blood (pleasant, eh? well it looked better than it sounds). Johnny Cash's song, Redemption, was playing in the space, and that was the inspiration for the whole idea of the room. Read the lyrics in the link above, and you'll get it. People could spend time listening to the song and thinking about the statement, "Into your hands I commit my spirit," and then they could write their own commitments on a leaf-shaped paper, then come up on the stage to hide it in the folds of the fabric.
I used a real cherry tree for the installation, one that we planted a day later and will hopefully produce cherries in a few years--it's self-pollinating and very slender, and I am surprised it survived the shock of being shoved sideways into my car, under door jambs, and other traumas a tree shouldn't experience. It's resilient, apparently, and is putting some tentative buds out as we speak.
Anyway, all the work involved in putting everything together, plus my physical exhaustion, plus being sick, plus fighting off depression and adjusting to medication that I'm not terribly happy with...I've bit off more than I can chew, and it's not a surprise that I haven't been able to chew on much for 2 weeks. God does have stark ways of slowing me down, though I always manage to put up a fight and never completely learn my lessons. Well, take me as I am, as that is all I can be without supernatural intervention.
It was truly a near thing, me going at all. Everything has been arranged for quite a while, but the food poisoning decided to linger to an excessive extent. I spent most of Saturday night and Sunday in the hospital, in excruciating pain, hooked up to fluids and potassium and pain killers, while D read to me and dozed beside my bed. We're in the middle of Steinbeck's East of Eden, a stunning narrative of family, insight, cold-blooded contempt, and new life in California. It was a glorious escape, to enter this other world and take my mind off of myself, and the disappointment that I knew was coming. A dehydrated, pain-filled exhausted woman should not get on a plane, alone, and then rent a car in an unknown city. Or eat any Texas BBQ and coleslaw and beans and tex-mex. It was really heart-breaking.
I had resigned myself to staying home, and sleeping on the couch all day like I had been doing for 2 weeks already (coughing like crazy, exhausted, then barfing like crazy, exhausted). Nothing like force of habit. But I started to hope in the evening, and called my doctor and emailed some people to pray for me, for wisdom and healing. I'm not sure it was wise, necessarily, to go, but I really did feel so much better the next day, when my flight was supposed to leave. My sister helped me pack, I loaded up my absurd number of prescription drugs (it's like feast or famine here, pill-wise. I've opened the floodgates now!), bananas, crackers and applesauce (which the TSA inspected carefully, as it probably looked like some sort of gel explosive device in there with all my plugs for gadgets and my beat-up computer), and off I went into the Blue.
There was so much going on at the conference, I spent little time elsewhere or contacting friends. For that, I apologize because I know people were worried and didn't know what was going on. Even now, there are so many people I have not had a chance to contact and I'm just so tired. The weeks leading up to easter were really intense, as I had a horrible cough/cold, along with a big part in the Good Friday service planning--what amounted to pretty much an art installation of sorts in the new sanctuary of our church. I was privileged to use the space for the first time, before it was officially "opened," and it was so rewarding. Briefly, I'll describe what my part of the experience was:
There were about 7 people who were part of the planning for the service, which is usually a contemporary, experiential, sortof stations-of-the-cross thing each year. This year we organized it around the seven last sayings of Christ on the cross, and applying them in a personal way to the congregants, encouraging meditation on scriptures (especially prophecies) that elucidate Jesus' love and sacrifice, and ending on a hopeful, contemplative note. The "room" I was in charge of designing was the last one, with "It is finished," and "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit."
People moved through a corridor of hanging rice papers with deep-red ink writing on them. Scripture passages about the finished work of Christ, the sacrifices, the grace of God, and the veil of the temple ripping in two were on the paper sheets. Then, across a ripped curtain was written, "It is finished." People then passed through the curtain to the main sanctuary space, with scattered chairs about and low lighting, except on the cross and on a tree sapling on the stage. The cross was made from the trunk of a huge tree they had to cut down to build the new building, and it's a stark but beautiful piece framed by the alcoves on the stage. It almost looked like the mouth of a tomb, the way we lit it for the service.
From the base of the cross to the tree was a flowing red piece of fabric that looked like a river of blood (pleasant, eh? well it looked better than it sounds). Johnny Cash's song, Redemption, was playing in the space, and that was the inspiration for the whole idea of the room. Read the lyrics in the link above, and you'll get it. People could spend time listening to the song and thinking about the statement, "Into your hands I commit my spirit," and then they could write their own commitments on a leaf-shaped paper, then come up on the stage to hide it in the folds of the fabric.
I used a real cherry tree for the installation, one that we planted a day later and will hopefully produce cherries in a few years--it's self-pollinating and very slender, and I am surprised it survived the shock of being shoved sideways into my car, under door jambs, and other traumas a tree shouldn't experience. It's resilient, apparently, and is putting some tentative buds out as we speak.Anyway, all the work involved in putting everything together, plus my physical exhaustion, plus being sick, plus fighting off depression and adjusting to medication that I'm not terribly happy with...I've bit off more than I can chew, and it's not a surprise that I haven't been able to chew on much for 2 weeks. God does have stark ways of slowing me down, though I always manage to put up a fight and never completely learn my lessons. Well, take me as I am, as that is all I can be without supernatural intervention.
posted by mk at 3:23 PM
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