ordinary time

the church nerds out there will point out that the season of ordinary time doesn't start until may 23rd. to the church nerds out there, i offer my deepest, most sincere apologies, and best wishes for you to get the hell over it.

ordinary...that word conjures up a lot of feelings inside of me, lately. it's a dangerous kind of word, a middle word, like "better" or phrases like "on the other hand". you have to be careful with words like "ordinary". we are all painfully ordinary in our extrordinary ways. each of us is a bright and shining thing, andare dulled by the lustre of the other. and while what i bring to the relationship table may seem like something rare and unexpected, i can assure you that it feels painfully normal and utterly ordinary to me.

case in point: i am never suprised. i am unflappable. it's damn near impossible to shock me. seriously, i'm not making this up. i say this without a single trace of pride. because, seriously, once people know that about you, it's kind of like open season. and that's ok, and i'm happy to turn this bizarre talent into something that's helpful to people. i mean, it's not like it's some parlor trick i've worked to perfection over the last decade. it's just how things are. i mean, the shocks i incurred as a teenager and young adult, the things i heard and saw, have made it virtually impossible to knock me off my stride. redemptive experiences find us in the oddest of moments. it's just this really totally ordinary thing in my life, not altogether different from the trick i can do where i fit 38 whole grapes in my mouth, at one time.

i've heard and seen some things. the echos and prints of terminal illness and drug addiction, of watching my family spin and struggle, and find it's footing, again...those echos make it almost easy to hear everything that has come after it. and those echos make it easier to carry the things people leave with me, when they tell me their stories. in this life, my lesson is to carry stories, to hold them, to remember them, to protect the sanctity of the stories i get to hear. i didn't understand that about myself until i was 27 or 28...but i understand it, now. and even though some of those stories find their way to me in the most unusual of ways, they are, at the bottom, ordinary stories of ordinary lives. people are just people, and shit happens.

i love stories, even the sad and hard ones. once i've heard someone's story, or part of it (because who ever really knows the whole story of someone, other than G-d?) my perceptions of them rarely change. people are who they are, the details notwithstanding. G-d put something special, unique, beautiful, magic, and world-changing in each and every single one of us, and that can never be taken away, reassigned, or given up. we are born so extraordinarily ordinary. and all the ancilliary things that happen to us along the way shape us, for sure, but for most of us (clearly exempting shit i don't understand at all, like serial killers...or televangelists...), the changes and chances and little lives and deaths inside our big life, they can't touch the absolute beauty that G-d puts inside each of us, nourishes with the milk of human kindness, and the strange and awesome forces of grace and mercy.

the native americans (total badasses...navajo rugs are my new favorite analogy...) used spirals in their sacred art. the entoptic shapes you see behind your eyes, when you close them, or press them tightly, are sometimes spirals, too (and hatchmarks, etc). this life, this ordinary life, sits on a spiral. we will learn the same lesson, over and over, because that's the lesson we have to learn, the lesson G-d asked us to learn as we were put together inside of our mothers' bodies, a lesson about our brokenness, our wholeness, how to tell stories, how to hear them, when to love more deeply, and when to walk away. it looks different for everyone, but it's all the same ordinary lesson. and that's pretty wonderful, i think.

mil besos,
rmg