The Great Sin

Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man. We say that people are proud of being rich, or clever, or good-looking, but they are not. They are proud of being richer, or cleverer, or better-looking than others.

Nearly all those evils in the world which people put down to greed or selfishness are really far more the result of Pride.

Other vices may sometimes bring people together: you may find good fellowship and jokes and friendliness among drunken people or unchaste people. But pride always means enmity - it is enmity. And not only enmity between man and man, but enmity to God.

In God you come up against something which is in every respect immeasurably superior to yourself. Unless you know God as that - and, therefore, know yourself as nothing in comparison - you do not know God at all. As long as you are proud you cannot know God. A proud man is always looking down on things and people: and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.

That raises a terrible question. How is it that people who are quite obviously eaten up with Pride can say they believe in God and appear to themselves very religious? I am afraid it means they are worshiping an imaginary God. They theoretically admit themselves to be nothing in the presence of this phantom God, but are really all the time imagining how He approves of them and think them far better than ordinary people...

Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis pp.122-124

unconventional, excellent advice

"Stop Trying to be Awesome":

There are many paths. Don't fret if you don't see yours quite so clearly yet. You might be forging one unique to you.

"Stop this "introspection""

Someone is always there for you to talk to. This means prayer. It's all about balance. Just cause you label yourself an introvert doesn't mean you opt out of being with other people. What makes you feel most human, anyway?

"This is water."

This is Water from Patrick Buckley on Vimeo.

Stop asking "what if" 

"We do not have to grope about blindly in prayer hoping we hit some cosmic bullseye called God’s will. We are freed to ask, “Will this decision allow me to participate more fully in God’s redemptive work in this world?” This lends tremendous freedom when it comes to making choices and doing God’s will."

in the face of rain bullets,

We were a phalanx of automobile soldiers, encased in our two-ton death machines of sonata silvers, mustang reds, a throng of strangers brought together at that intersection of our common life paths, all converged into one meticulous formation, military precision, for those few seconds on 29 North this afternoon. We're all in this togetherrr -- against our common enemy: the unexpected onslaught of grey Saturday rainclouds, pelting our windshields with deadly multiplicity in our humble commute homeward. Homeward-bound. Rainward-bent. Leaning determinedly into the precipitation that would've been fluffy death, just a week ago. All together now. We'll make it out of this mess.

Until the black Camaro cuts me off/

and the spell is broken. The roadrage urges bubble, boil, just beneath/

all that camaraderie-schmaraderie.

meta-upchuck: leaning in

It is exceedingly frustrating to be in a conversation with a bunch of privileged, well-educated but under-experienced young (college) people about things that we've only theorized about in classrooms and read about in our New York Times articles, about worlds we haven't experienced, people we don't know how to empathize with, criticizing criticisms and throwing out - throwing up - theories that have been shallowly crammed into only the thin-aired layers of our uppermost brain stratospheres. No one knows how to answer anything except in more questions, in more tangential quips about some new detail they can bring to the blabber, in a yet louder voice, source: yet another TedTalk that we only used half of our hearts to concertedly browse through.

In short, it is exceedingly frustrating to be in conversations with a bunch of [me]s. Solipsistic and hamster-wheeling our way into the most civilized kind of arguments about Big Problems Plaguing Our World Today [AS NEVER BEFOOOREEE!!], mind-numbingly unproductive,  rankly stagnant in our game of selfjustification-sophistication. Sometimes it feels like some sort of manic speed and endurance game, where everyone in the circle has to say at least one thing before the whole group goes around once, and you'll compete for that golden spotlight - at once glorious and terrifying - before and after which nothing matters. Other than those isolated moments of self-sparkle, you listen. Or not.

In these maddening moments of the sick circle game we play in all our liberal arts tragi-comedic glamour, sometimes I get the urge to block up my ears with my fists (ineffective, I know, but it's a part of the whole unfortunate scheme) and run around the room, yelling AHHH, full-on first grade. It is my daydream that someday, someone [me!?] will join in, and we will begin an impromptu game of duck-duck-goose -- finally rendering some meaning and humanity and real-life progress back into that holy circle of trust, intellectual stimulation, and forward-thinking maturation into which I leeeeeean, too often these days, as a fourth year undergraduate kid who knows nothing about everything, as fickle as a sunny, sandwichy day, complete with storm clouds of banality brewing, imminent and menacing in the lurky canvas corners of Normal Life.

What does your ideal meal look like? -sunshine & sandwiches-

a summer picnic

a summer picnic with no pesky bugs (unpesky ones welcome)

a summer picnic with no pesky bugs, and a fresh, summery breeze that sweeps away extra deposits of sunshine just as you're about to get "too" anything, no sweating allowed unless you wanna run around and throw around a frisbee except not frisbees because those always come over and hit me on the head.

a summer picnic with no pesky bugs, and a fresh, summery breeze that sweeps away extra deposits of sunshine just as you're about to get "too" anything, and simple, but filling food (maybe sandwiches; homemade multi-grain bread, freshly-sliced deli meats, AWL the cheeses from France, whole-grain mustard = KEY; sweet potato fries, somehow still warm from the fryer; all kinds of FRUIT, gathered from trees/bushes/the earth [somehow now we are in an orchard. or there's an orchard nearby, ~14 minute walk]; some kind of CAKE, no nuts except maybe hazelnuts except okay maybe half and half, for the nut-averse/nut-endangered... etc. but the food is not truly the point)

a summer picnic with no pesky bugs, and a fresh, summery breeze that sweeps away extra deposits of sunshine just as you're about to get "too" anything,  and simple, but filling food, on well-worn but clean, bright, perfectly sized picnic blankets that make us all sit kind of close to each other but not too crowdedly (the US is unforeseen, and this is the beauty of it all. a picnic of unexpectedly, unplannedly perfect group of thinkers, talkers, feelers, friends and strangers, coming together for various good and terrible reasons such as 1. car has broken down right next to the picnic, 2. you are looking for a lost pet gerbil in the field, 3. you started the picnic, etc.)

a summer picnic with no pesky bugs, and a fresh, summery breeze that sweeps away extra deposits of sunshine just as you're about to get "too" anything,  and simple, but filling food, on well-worn but clean, bright, perfectly sized picnic blankets that make us all sit kind of close to each other but not too crowdedly, in which the WE feelings are high and triumphant but inclusive and loving and YOU can join, too. 

a summer picnic. with sunshine & sandwiches. with you. and the blanket doesn't even have to be plaid.

that pure poetry of fruit

On those luminous mornings Adela returned from the market, like Pomona emerging from the flames of day, spilling from her basket the colorful beauty of the sun -- the shiny pink cherries full of juice under their transparent skins, the mysterious black morellos that smelled so much better than they tasted; apricots in whose golden pulp lay the core of long afternoons. And next to that pure poetry of fruit, she unloaded sides of meat with their keyboard of ribs swollen with energy and strength, and seaweeds of vegetables like dead octopuses and squids -- the raw material of meals with a yet undefined taste, the vegetative and terrestrial ingredients of dinner, exuding a wild and rustic smell. 

Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles, p.25

notes of late:

hey, stop yourself in all the busy goings and comings and scurryings to just say

• hello!
• goodbye (properly)
• thank you very, very much. I really appreciate you/what you have done.//I love this!
• I am sorry for this. for making you feel that way. for being terrible. for not knowing it. 
• and thank you for letting me know.
• yesitwasme, I checked out that library book but didn't tell you and now it is missing for your class and ah ahhh AH
• "AHA HA! :D"
• agh. please help me. I need it, your help. I admit it. 
• hey are you doing okay?
• I THINK YOU LOOK MARVELOUS TODAY.
• I'm not sure what this means. I did my best to understand but I still don't. maybe other people here feel the same way. could you explain one more time, please?
• I love you.

mannn I forget the most basic things sometimes. kindergarten lessons everydayyyy.

last minnit weekend muzings

bleary-eyed post for the memory troves

as I tuck myself inexpertly into bed and turn on the warm side of the bedside lamp

head a littlespinning, eyelids a-closin'

and dad hums nanamouskourri to himself next door (having appropriated J's high school room for his impromptu officespace) and the secret garden ost floats emotionally on up the stairs from the youtuberepeater downstairs in the kitchen

just to say that --

23 feels much heavier - weightier in the front pocket of my Life apron - than any of the other numbers, much more, even, than the momentous ones like 15 (if I were mexicana), 16 (so sweet), 18, 21...

just that it feels so much closer to real adulthood for some reason, in some different way than it would were I facing graduation as a 22-year-old, I'm sure.

maybe it's the bodaciousness of the curves on that 3. mm. it's almost too much.

and maybe it's feeling extra-nice, extra-meaningful tonight cause of the extra-weightiness of the 2 and the 3 (all those curves ooh), but I have a real treasure trove of friends surrounding me this year; expert birthday card writers, all of them. are these particular people in this particular location, particularly special? for the conversations we've shared and fierce tears we've seen each other shed and God-seeking we've been doing togetherly? has any of it ever been in our hands? the criss-crossy paths that have brought us together, the buses we rode together, the library dates, the not-so-endless sleepovernights that inevitably ended with someone falling asleep in the middle of someone else's hushed-voice sentence, big-kid swaddled in our orange sleeping bags? or are we just growing up, and with us, the quality of our sentimental sentences and love-laden letters, too?

all of these things. yes.

thoughts that floated in and out while brushing the teef and washing the faze.

so, so thankful.

Ephesians 4:29-32

English Standard Version (ESV)

29 Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear. 30 And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day ofredemption. 31 Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. 32 Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.

SCHULZ on ART

I do not know just how in childhood we arrive at certain images, images of crucial significance to us. They are like filaments in a solution around which the sense of the world crystallizes for us... They are meanings that seem predestined for us, ready and waiting at the very entrance of our life...

These early images mark the boundaries of an artist's creativity. His creativity is a deduction from assumptions already made. He cannot now discover anything new; he learns only to understand more and more the secret entrusted to him at the beginning, and his art is a constant exegesis, a commentary on that single verse that was assign him. But art will never unravel that secret completely. The secret remains insoluble. The knot in which the soul was bound is no trick knot, coming apart with a tug at its end. On the contrary, it grows tighter and tighter. We work at it, untying, tracing the path of the string, seeking the end, and out of this manipulating comes art...

THE STREET OF CROCODILES_SCHULZ_ INTRODUCTION BY FICOWSKI

Lacking the courage to address readers, he tried at first to write for a reader, a recipient of his letters. When at last, around 1930, he found a partner for this exchange in the person of Deborah Vogel, a poet and doctor of philosophy who lived in Lvov, his letters -- even then often masterpieces of the epistolary art -- underwent a metamorphosis, becoming daring fragments of dazzling prose. His correspondent, greatly excited, urged him to continue. It was in this way, letter by letter, piece by piece, that The Street of Crocodiles came into being, a literary work enclosed a few pages at a time in envelopes and dropped into the mailbox.

I still love snow.

 JANUARY

FEBRUARY

MARCH

unsexy but so attractive

There's nothing sexy or glamorous about menstrual hygiene.

But something so attractive about revolutionarily simple, simply revolutionary science & technology that make you appreciate things you always forget to appreciate, that change lives on unimaginable scales, that isn't complicated or pompous for the sake of being complicated or pompous.


Dear future husband,

I chose to be an English major, and in this final semester of my undergrad career, am sort of regretting the education I missed out on (though I know, I know... I'll probably do this for the rest of my life, about every other thing I didn't learn). So I'm hoping you're good at science-y and technology-y things, cause this is really attractive, this desire to better lives through uncomplicated innovation. It probably helps that I feel inept in this whole realm, and am extremely easy to impress.

So. You change the world with really smart, simple science, and I'll write you poems and edit your articles to communicate to more more more people who might be in need of your help.

Dreamteam!!

mmmmmmmmmhmmmmmmmmmm 

knitting

there is something profound about it, but I haven't quite put my finger on what it is

r.i.p. dear scarfling of 7,380 start-overs ago
sigh at this rate, I will never knit that sweater

A Story Can Change Your Life

by Peter Everwine

On the morning she became a young widow,

my grandmother, startled by a sudden shadow,

looked up from her work to see a hawk turn

her prized rooster into a cloud of feathers.

That same moment, halfway around the world

in a Minnesota mine, her husband died,

buried under a ton of rock-fall.

She told me this story sixty years ago.

I don't know if it's true but it ought to be.

She was a hard old woman, and though she knelt

on Sundays when the acolyte's silver bell

announced the moment of Christ's miracle,

it was the darker mysteries she lived by:

shiver-cry of an owl, black dog by the roadside,

a tapping at the door and nobody there.

The moral of the story was plain enough:

miracles become a burden and require a priest

to explain them. With signs, you only need

to keep your wits about you and place your trust

in a shadow world that lets you know hard luck

and grief are coming your way. And for that

—so the story goes—any day will do.

"oy vey"s & in-advance hallelujahs

“The case for the humanities is not hard to make, though it can be difficult--to such an extent have we been marginalized, so long have we acceded to that marginalization--not to sound either defensive or naive. The humanities, done right, are the crucible within which our evolving notions of what it means to be fully human are put to the test; they teach us, incrementally, endlessly, not what to do but how to be. Their method is confrontational, their domain unlimited, their "product" not truth but the reasoned search for truth, their "success" something very much like Frost's momentary stay against confusion.”

― Mark Slouka

This year, for the first time in at least a very long time (perhaps since the beginning of things), the English department's graduation ceremony will not be held on the Lawn. It's historic and subtle at the same time, significant and sort of sneaky, because they're just shifting us over to the amphitheater - arguably just as central to the university grounds and just as appropriate for the values of the English major. "We deal with theater, too," my Jewish lit professor said, a little dejectedly.

I guess... But let's be real. She was just as unconvinced as I am about the okayness of this whole Lawn --> Amphitheater shift. It's not the same.

The sand dunes of education have been changing, bit by bit, one wind drift after another, displacing mountains of sand and creating brand new ones elsewhere, subtly but certainly changing the landscape of the humanities. It's hugely symbolic, this change, and merely symptomatic of the undercurrents of change rushing beneath the surface. We've forgotten how to value the humanities. What about the renaissance man ideal? What about the Grand Tour? I feel like I was born in the wrong century. But if that could somehow be rectified, I would be the wrong gender. Oy vey.

It's disturbing, but maybe that's only because I happen to be on this side of the demarcation. The "wrong side," outdated and marginalized because those are the rules of society today, just as the merchants and craftsmen must have felt in the days of those bougie renaissance men who got to travel all over Europe in their privileged, bougie, fancypantsy lives. And it would be too blindly simplistic to just stomp my left foot in indignation at the loss of humanity!!!!!1 and the deplorable values!!! of our society, because you've gotta give credit to those responsible, productive-members-of-society-to-be for wanting to make themselves marketable. To become employed someday and earn the moneys. To provide for their future families and their future families.

They might even be closet poetry lovers; martyrs, in a sense, led to the sacrificial pyre of our failing economy, burning bright with the irresistible aura of Wall Street, beckoning us like helpless moths toward those cruel but effective zappy summer camp lights, and the grinding machinations of our Society of Productivity. It's all complicated.

All I know is that the Comm school has the plushiest of chairs, and I did not choose to study anything remotely related to money and other potentially depressing things.

But still, while I mourn for the loss of the English department's fight for the Lawn during that epic ceremony of the class of 2014, I am also at peace. Our growing obsession with money wasn't anything unanticipated by Jesus. Just google yourself a favor and ask the internet: "how many verses about money in the bible." We are so predictable, and that's weirdly reassuring.

This probably explains why I am more excited than scared for that insane, forever-anticipated May date when my formal education officially ends (for now), and life as I know it will veer crazily off its track of predictable year-after-years of being a ____-grader. I will no longer be defined by the number of years I've been in school, and hopefully also by other numbers, too, though I hear that's a little more persistent of a problem (SAT scores... GPA... GREs... salary... the numbers don't end).

As of now, March 13th 2014, life after May something 2014 is a void, in many senses - I will no longer have that "occupation" as Full-Time Student, will no longer be "going to UVA," will no longer "be" an English major; all these things will have been relegated to past-tense realities. But at the same time, many things continue: ever a follower of Christ, a child of God, a daughter to my parents and sister to my sister, there are lots of things to find my identity in.

So in this moment, I take delight in the adventuresome excitement of the blankness. "That's pretty hard, being excited about uncertainty," someone said to me a little while back, when I was gushing (not rully) about the exciting combination of not having a job + graduating in a few months. But I dunno -- I am okay. I'm doing okay. Praise God for that, because even this momentary sanity is because of the fact that in him all things hold together. Every second of normalcy and sanity is a paradox and a miracle.

As will be the moment when I do finally get a job or something. Miracle indeed. In-advance Hallelujahs abound.

how to begin a story; how to learn; how to grow

THE FORMLESS VOID (Mendelsohn, chapter 2)

...the issue that Friedman is interested in having his readers understand is, in essence, a writer's issue: How do you begin a story? For Friedman, the opening of Bereishit brings to mind a technique we all know from the movies: "Like some films that begin with a sweeping shot that then narrows," he writes, "so the first chapter of Genesis moves gradually from a picture of the skies and earth down to the first man and woman. The story's focus will continue to narrow: from the universe to the earth to humankind to specific lands and people's to a single family." And yet, he reminds his readers, the wider, cosmic concerns of the world-historical story that the Torah tells will remain in the back of our minds as we read on, providing the rich substratum of meaning that gives such depth to that family's story.

Friedman's observation implies, as is certainly true, that often it is the small things, rather than the big picture, that the mind can comfortably grasp: that, for instance, it is naturally more appealing to readers to absorb the meaning of a vast historical event through the story of a single family.

CREATION (Mendelsohn, chapter 1)

To my mind, this progress from ruin to correction is intimately connected to the nature of knowledge itself, which is, at best, a process: from ignorance to awareness, from intellectual "ruin" to its "correction," from indistinct chaos to orderly scholarship. Knowledge, therefore encompasses at once the starting point, which is empty, harmful, painful, and the end point, which is pleasure. To my mind it is this quality of process, of development, which can only take place over time, that answers, finally, the question of why Knowledge must come from a tree. For a tree is a thing that grows; and growth, like learning, can only happen over and through time itself. Indeed, outside the medium of time, words like "grow" and "learn" cannot have any meaning at all.

tree of knowledge

record of Grace, part 2/948,729,834,713,487,349,827,384,729,330

Have been thinking about sonship and adoption into God's family. And the mysterious and beautiful process of justification to full righteousness and slow but sure sanctification as a follower of Christ, (ful)filling that God-shaped hole in the soul and discovering the purpose for which we were created. And all I can say is, uh...

golden gifts for a golden 23

oh-h-h she
knows me
so-o-o-o-o well

tventytree

Getting Old

by Jack Gilbert

The soft wind comes sweet in the night

on the mountain. Invisible except for

the sound it makes in the big poplars outside

and the feel on his naked, single body,

which breathes quietly a little before dawn,

eyes open and in love with the table

and chair in the transparent dark and stars

in the other window. Soon it will be time

for the first tea and cool pear and then

the miles down and miles up the mountain.

"Old and alone," he thinks, smiling.

Full of what abundance has done to his spirit.

Feeling around inside to see if his heart

is still, thank God, ambitious. The way

old men look in their eyes each morning.

Knowing she isn't there and how much Michiko

isn't anywhere. The eyes close as he remembers

seeing the big owl on the roof last night

for the first time after hearing it for months.

Thinking how much he has grown unsuited

for love the size it is for him. "But maybe

not," he says. And the eyes open as he

grins at the heart's stubborn pretending.

whatwhatwhathowhow

what is righteousness?
what does it mean to live a righteous life?
what does the life of a righteous person look like?
how does God require righteousness of us, how does he make this possible for us?
how is it different from holiness?

Thank you for wonderings and questions and brothers and sisters with whom to seek for the answers. Let us continue to be satisfied in you, as in nothing else, but also never let us be complacent in the state of our knowledge, our experience of you. you are infinite! I cannot understand that. but I don't need to. I don't want to.

"Nothing would ever get me to leave here."

from The Plot Against America (207), Philip Roth

Since about three it had been squalling steadily, but abruptly the wind-driven downpour stopped and the sun came blazing our as though the clocks had been turned ahead and, over in the west, tomorrow morning was now set to begin at six p.m. today. How could a street as modest as ours induce such rapture just because it glittered with rain? How could the sidewalk's impassable leaf-strewn lagoons and the grassy little yards oozing from he flood of the downspouts exude a smell that roused my delight as if I'd been born in a tropical rain forest? Tinged with the bright after-storm light, Summit Avenue was as agleam with life as a pet, my own silky, pulsating pet, washed clean by sheets of falling water and now stretched its full length to bask in the bliss.

A nine-year-old love rhapsody for his home-street; it's more grown-up and luscious than anything, there's nothing nine-year-old about it. This is the power of Roth's prose, ebbing and flowing between childhood and grownupness, between the pungent rapture of New Jersey rain forests and silky, pulsating pet-lives concerning no puppies, no kittens, no scaly reptiles at all.

Thank you God for Emergencies in PAVS 4500

and again

The power of fiction is to create empathy. It lifts you away from your chair and stuffs you gently down inside someone else's point of view... A newspaper could tell you that one hundred people, say, in an airplane, or in Israel, or in Iraq, have died today. And you can think to yourself, "How very sad," then turn the page and see how the Wildcats fared. But a novel could take just one of those hundred lives and show you exactly how it felt to be that person rising from bed in the morning, watching the desert light on the tile of her doorway and on the curve of her daughter's cheek. You could taste that person's breakfast, and love her family, and sort through her worries as your own, and know that a death in that household will be the end of the only life that someone will ever have. As important as yours. As important as mine.

from "High Tide in Tucson" -Barbara Kingsolver

how to give to international aid organizations:

from "Poverty is No Pond: Challenges for the Affluent" -Leif Wenar

What affluent individuals faced with the challenges of aid should not do is to take either of two paths of avoidance. the first path is to deny the facts about aid. Many affluent individuals take pride in being morally good people. Many, and especially those who already give to aid organizations, see giving to aid organizations as one important thing that morally good people do. These people sometimes find facts about the possible harms and uncertainties of aid as threatening to their own self-image, and so close their eyes to these facts. These well-intentioned people should be gently reminded: Severe poverty is not about you. Its moral importance is much greater than that of affluent people maintaining a certain self-image. It is imperative for all of us to try to reduce severe poverty, which means always focusing our attention on the world as it is.

The second path of avoidance is the selfishness of uncertainty, or "the paralysis of analysis." Individuals may become overwhelmed by the challenges of aid, conclude that they can never know what aid will do, and give themselves over to pursuing their own concerns. This is also not an adequate response.

Dear God, when I become a real, official adult person contributing real, official adult things to society and gaining a real, official adult kind of income, help me not to be tied to money as a slave to his master. Let me give it away freely but wisely, with the respect - but not adoration - it deserves; as a good steward of good gifts that you give to us for a short time here. Let me be free from those grasping desires, for grasping things, in turn getting grasped by them, attached to the world and its shiny, breakable things. 

But before all of these things please let me find a job amen.

how to make stress your friend:

"this is my body helping me rise to this challenge."

revolutionary self-brainwashing possibilities.
go go go

"stress makes you social"

being stressed together helps! so let's talk

things I am learning as of late:

bullet point style --

• I am small.
• God is BIG! 
• I think I've been fooling myself into thinking that I was okay with both of the things above, that I don't really care about this state of reality. But actually, I care a lot. I want to make much of myself. Not in a let's-become-Taylor-Swift way (okay or even like a let's become Ingrid Michaelson way, cause let's be real I am so far from wanting to be TSwift), but like I want to be recognized for humanly things. Encompassing career, academic prestige, the acknowledgment of the peoplez for whatever character/personality trait, etc. Even recognition for the fact that I hold values that are poetic, such as the fact that "I am small in God's big world," ugh you tricky little soul.
• Somehow, God individually and particularly loves ME. Little, insignificant-and-not-okay-with-this me.
• This renders me significant. [oh, right. identity in Christ? oh.]
• The best lessons are always always always easier said than lived.

two sidewalks diverged in a parking lot
and I,

and I,
and I,

I am at the library hing

My mama gets cuter and cuter every day.

Cleaning House

by Scott Owens

Pulling the house down piece by piece,

we see each other at our worst

before we've even had our first date,

my face itching with black insulation,

yours covered with white dust of sheetrock.

We scrape off paint and paper, buff out

spots, old glue, unexplained

stains, remove tacky paneling

revealing forgotten charm, original

beadboard, hard woods, solid ceilings.

We're woefully unprepared, untrained,

undertooled, cutting off pipes

with hacksaws, filling holes with toothpicks,

brillo pads, good wood pulled

up from where it wouldn't be seen.

An odd sort of courting really,

hammer and nails instead of flowers,

microwaved Hot Pockets for meals,

red wine in paper cups, all glasses

still mysteriously packed away.

Ripping out rotted casements of windows,

hollow doors, seven layers of floor,

we sweat together, swear together,

bend in unison towards the necessary

destruction that always precedes renewal.