Words Have Meaning, Unless They Don't

The second of my Happiness Project commandments, "words have meaning," began unraveling the moment I wrote it. For insight into the power and limitations of words, I turn to Stephen Dunn.

In a poem dedicated to his brother, he writes, "What is the past if not unfinished work? / Swampy, fecund, seductively revisable? / One of us has spent his life developing respect / for the weakness of words, the other for what / must be held onto; there may be a chance for us" (from "Our Parents" in Different Hours).

It is the poet, of course, who develops the reverence for the weakness of words. "Poet" was one of the first identities, at fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, that I took on wholeheartedly. It felt like a spiritual calling.

IF THE POET

If the poet doesn’t yield to the priest,
as Stevens says he shouldn’t,
and if both reside in the same village,
and call on their powers to rectify
or explain the latest disaster,

does the priest become less persuasive
because his ideas are likely not his own,
and is the poet suspect for the same reason?
Would a good priest find the right words,
as the good poet would, in among the many words

passed down for centuries
on what to think, what to believe? Or would reverence
always get in the way of the true,
thus possibly giving the poet the edge?

That is, if the poet mistrusts words, as he should,
makes them pass hard tests, knows that they must
be arranged and shaped in order to convey
even a smidgen of truth, wouldn’t he,
although self-ordained, be more reliable?

But what if the villagers believed
they were saved by a prayer the priest said
on Sunday among the ruins? And all the poet
could do was elegize the ruins?
Would the real and the imagined fuse,
become something entirely new?

And what if the poet and priest were one,
each invoking the other as the crops grew
and rain was steady in rainy season, or,
just as confusing, things got worse
and prayers proved useless, and poems
merely decorated the debris where a house

once was? Would it be time for the priest
to admit he’d known but one book? For the poet
to say he’s read many, and look, it hasn’t helped?
Or has the issue from the start been a great need
that can’t be fully met, only made bearable
and sometimes served by those who try?

Stephen Dunn from Lines of Defense, W.W. Norton & Company, 2014

Religious zealots, Zen Buddhists, political activists, radio show hosts and poets all have different uses for language and different relationships to language. In this blog, I hope to expose the way language is used to silence and oppress and to highlight those occasions when it is used to celebrate and uplift.

The relationships will get dicey. The priests are everywhere, and many of them have good intentions. The poets profess to many faiths.

Still, priests and poets have different reference points for truth. I'm glad Dunn put these two in the same village. I might put them in the same room. It's time they talked face to face.

Discipline, Empathy and Grace

Every January for the past fifteen years, I've made an intention collage. It's an excuse, once a year, to do a crafty project and anticipate the year to come. What do I want to bring into my life? Most collages include pictures of glasses of wine, books I want to read and short phrases about friendship, the future or financial goals.

About five years ago, I simplified. I spent my long, four-hour afternoon paging through magazines for large, beautiful letters to the words discipline, empathy and grace. The experience of making this different kind of collage had a more Zen-like quality. Instead of anxiously looking among all of the possible pictures and words, I skimmed calmly for exactly what I was looking for. The result hung on my wall for years.

I have never been more true to these intentions than in the two months I've been living with Sonia. So we may still be in the honeymoon period; I'll grant you that. Nonetheless, there's no denying the fact: I'm happier, calmer and more productive when I'm partnered.

Discipline

Getting up early has been a struggle since I was a teen. I always have grand plans, which when I lived alone meant setting my alarm for 7:00am and then dozing for at least an hour. That's the worst kind of sleep. I've read the articles, but that didn't stop me from hitting the snooze button half a dozen times. It was a rare day that I jumped out of bed when the alarm went off.

When Sonia and I first moved in together, she was studying for a test that required her to get up at 5:30am. I got up, made breakfast, made the bed. I even motivated her many mornings. When she was finished studying for the summer, I continued rising early. Drinking less helps, too. Sonia doesn't drink, and giving up the weekday brews is good for my waistline and health. Now, I'm getting up by 6:15am to write before work, something I've been meaning do to for years.

Empathy

I picked this trait at a time when I realized I'd broken a woman's heart because I'd allowed the relationship to go on for far too long, even though I knew my own heart wasn't in it. I knew I'd hurt her deeply, but was completely detached through the entire breakup. We weren't able to stay friends. Maybe this is normal, but I carried a lot of guilt. Maybe if I'd broken it off sooner, it could have been less painful.

It's always been easier for me to empathize with a stranger or acquaintance than with someone close to me, but that is changing with Sonia. Daily life together, and two years of dating before that, have helped me to understand what she's thinking and feeling about a situation, even before we talk about it. That doesn't mean I'm going to stop nudging her to be a little more social (like me!), but it has taught me when to back off and let her be Sonia.

Grace

I have never been particularly graceful. Like many aging women, I look back at myself as a teen or twenty-something and can't believe how lovely I was at the time. But I didn't feel beautiful; I felt overweight and awkward and insecure. There's a lesson in there. Now when I look in the mirror, I try to imagine myself at seventy, looking at myself now. I will regret it if I don't revel in my youth and vitality, so I'm learning to toss the self-criticisms aside.

How does Sonia support my gracefulness? Well...she encourages me not to be such a klutz! When we first moved in, I think I stubbed my left, second-biggest toe on every single new piece of furniture we brought into the apartment. Thankfully, I've gotten more used to where everything is in the new place. In all seriousness, I'm working out more -- and more regularly -- than I have since my early 20s, and it feels good. The clothes are fitting the way they should.

One day soon, I'm going to use discipline, empathy and grace to build my own set of Commandments. But for today, I'm just grateful, and yes, happy. This is what it looks like.

On Humility and Not Knowing Yourself

Gretchen Rubin noted the Voltaire quote, "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good," as a kind of mantra she returned to throughout her happiness project. For those of us with high standards and fair ability to meet those standards, this is resonant. I'm taking it to heart this morning. It's going to be a short one.

Paulo Coelho, late-blooming writer and a kind of mystic to many readers of his book The Alchemist, recently told Krista Tippett that he doesn't know who he is. Keep in mind this guy is pushing 70, a writer with a simple elegance that gives him the aura of a guru.

"To be totally honest, I don't know who I am," he said, "and I don't think people ever will know who they are. We have to be humble enough to learn to live with this mysterious question: who am I? So I am a mystery to myself." Find more and listen at Paulo Coelho - The Alchemy of Pilgrimage.

The idea that we could be humble and recognize that we cannot fully know ourselves has a unique resonance for LGBTQ people, who are so often asked to put ourselves in a box so that the mainstream might understand us better. So that we may be less threatening in our otherness.

For all of our differences, I credit my parents with instilling in me a keen sense of justice and a deep trust in my own mind and heart. And although I used the word "gay" for this blog, I've wrestled with all of the language thrust upon (and yes, often owned and embraced) by LGBTQ people. It's part of the reason it's taken me so long to begin writing about my own otherness.

Although it's early in my own pilgrimage of this blog, I'll pose my first question to you, reader. How do these words: lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer work for you? How have they contributed to or detracted from your own joy in being a person traveling through the world?

Gay Squared

Gay squared: as in, both gay and happy. Is it possible?

After I finished Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project, I decided to start a blog to find out what you think, and share my evolving thoughts on the subject.

The Happiness Project sat on my shelf for almost three years before I picked it up. It’d been given to me by Liz, my best friend from college and a straight woman, at a time when our relationship was strained. I didn’t picked it up for the same reason I never picked up the books called “Finding Your Pathway to God,” and the like, given to me by my mother from the age of thirteen onward. A gift in the form of a judgement.

I finally did pick Rubin's book up, following a yoga weekend, Liz’s alternative bachelorette party, during the summer of 2016. It was a quick read, pleasant and light. I liked the businesslike approach Rubin took to her own life and improvement. It felt familiar. Familiar, too was her self-deprecation, her love of urban life and her too-quick criticism of others, especially those closest to her. What wasn’t familiar, however, was her straight, nuclear family: loving husband, adorable girls, one set of grandparents around the corner, the other across the country but very present.

I’m a 34-year-old queer woman, the daughter of an Evangelical Christian and a Catholic, living with my Korean girlfriend, Sonia, in a major east coast city. Sonia is first generation American and has an actual language barrier with her own parents; my parents and I all speak English, but as you’ll see in future posts, that doesn’t always mean that communication happens.

Rubin’s book brought up some questions for me. What does happiness look like for LGBTQ people who can’t share their happiness with the tribe in which they were raised? (There are still too many of us in that boat.) How do we affirm our happiness in a way that makes it easy for others to see, regardless of creed? Perhaps most importantly, how do we protect our happiness from those who would demean it?

Alongside these questions, for me, is a unique relationship to technology highlighted in Anna Garvey’s article on the Oregon Trail Generation. I was born in 1981. In sixth grade, I typed the log of my science fair project on a typewriter; I stenciled the backboard with stencils purchased at A.C. Moore. The very next year, I typed my science project into our Apple computer and printed the pages out on our dot matrix printer, carefully removing those perforated edges.

As I was growing up, so was the internet. I remember venturing into my first chat rooms in seventh grade, meeting kids like me (at least, I hope they were kids) from around the country, making small talk and feeling the world open up. Prior to that, I’d only had books as evidence of what regular life was like outside my little nuclear family and immediate experience. Books and TV didn’t count, to my mind; that wasn’t regular life.

Now the director of a regional nonprofit, I cut my teeth using online outreach to find constituents at a time when most of my supervisors were still learning what social media was. From then to now, when I have found myself stymied, personally or professionally, I have turned to the web in various forms, whether it’s learning a new application or finding a top ten list of ways to talk to your Evangelical mother. Sonia and I met on OKCupid almost three years ago.

Which brings me to my relationship with you, reader. I'm looking for something, and believe in the discipline of daily writing practice, but it's easier with an audience.

What does gay happiness look like today, and how do we affirm it?

I look forward to sharing my observations, analyses and stories, and reading yours.