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It’s early and I’m up.

I’m up and on the patio sipping coffee on the concrete because I don’t want to be on call for catch. The sky is the color of wet pavement. I’m sitting in the dark, Indian style and listening the big early morning trucks struggle up gradual inclines, and the train clunking down the track with it’ metal on metal song, and I’m watching the twinkling of the city lights fade with the slow arrival of a pink and orange and brown sky. I’m awake before the alarm clock, but not the alarm coffee pot or the alarm kitty. I’m thinking about how excited I am for the drive I’ll take in the morning and the pictures I’ll take at dawn. I’m remembering how many mornings I spent like this before The Mc, learning the noises the squirrels in my trees (and roof) made, the rambling that would drip from my finger tips at least an hour a day. I’m thinking that as much as I miss that time alone and that fraction of those days, as much as I rejoice in them when I have them now – like an old friend who’s come to visit – I wouldn’t trade what I have now. I remind myself that finding the balance will be work, and I’m making a note to give myself a quarterly performance review to make sure I stay on track. I find the quiet and the time now when he goes out of town to see his mom at the little farm in south Georgia and the little house his grand-daddy built, like he has this weekend. There’s a bird talking to his friends from a power line and I wonder if he knows the pack of his brethren that would wake me in chorus from my open window in that old apartment on Highland. It was a lifetime ago. I’m making a note to revisit my goal list and wondering what happened to my sense of adventure.

The clock is ticking.

In just a few short weeks, I’ll be taking a long weekend to myself in the hills of north Georgia, at Pura Vida.

I have no solid plans surrounding the trip beyond a massage the morning after I arrive, a facial on Saturday, and thanking Meg for the location suggestion. A pile of books, some knitting and my camera will make the trip, but I’m not committing to anything.

I already feel liberated.

Gudrun shot me.

Not in the library with a revolver, but in Wananga’s place at StudioPlex with film and digital.

She’s an amazing woman, who oozes passion for her interests in a way that would be near impossible to replicate. Genuine, brutally honest and clever.

When I’d exhausted her patience, Cory shot me. He’s kind and gentle, patient and imaginative. I’m excited to see if he’s able to use anything we did last night.

They were both incredibly kind and tolerant with me (She Who Avoids Being Shot at Almost Any Cost) all the while helping me learn to be silly and let go. A lesson I may not have mastered the first time around, but something that I’ll be practicing, and something I’ll thank them for again and again in years to come.

In the last few weeks we’ve said good-bye to a family member, looked at half a dozen houses and had a fight (we never fight).

I’ve been allowing myself to be pulled like taffy from event to event, obligation to obligation.

Last night I watched the sky light up over downtown and made a vow to myself to take it back: my time misses me. My legs miss stretching and hitting the pavement, my mind misses long nights of physically (not mentally) exhausted sleep. My fingers miss typing and spilling out my cares, worries, observations and frustrations.

Like doing the right thing, it’s really that simple - but rarely that easy.

Walking into an unfamiliar church (which equates to all but 3 on the planet) gives me hives and flashbacks to small town, foreign country new high school nightmares.

All eyes are on you as you walk in with your wrong hair/wrong clothes/wrong accent. Long, painful minutes of judging have already been endured before you cross the threshold to homeroom, and you know you’ve already lost. You don’t know the right things to say, how to say them, when to say them. When it’s okay to laugh, ask questions, or be honest.

The judging doesn’t come from the God I know, it comes from the people in the pews.

My fundamental issues with organized religion may have been burned into my intellectual DNA from my father before I was in the womb: I ask questions, just as he did when he was in seminary. Beyond the students, I find myself scrunching my nose and tilting my head when my teachers speak. When the man or woman with the collective attention leaves out key bits of the stories from the bible - like when telling the story of Abraham and glossing over the fact that he didn’t trust God and bonked a young woman in his wife (Sarah)’s employ in order to secure his lineage (I know, I know, wait for next week).

I still want to know why the first chunk of the bible is chock full of men praying to God for strength to defeat (many times in long, descriptive ways) their enemies, and why this is something frequently and conveniently not mentioned in any church I’ve been to. Why would these men think God would help them destroy his children? Would He?

A people watcher by nature, it’s also and incredible struggle for me to sit in a church and not be distracted by the guy behind me who is over acting. Who saves twenty spots then talks on his cell until service starts trying to find his “friends” and get them to sit with him. Who talks too loud with said friends while I’m trying to plug in and be present. Who sings at the top of his lungs. Should I be jealous of his faith? Of his ability to let it all hang out there? Do I have the patience or tolerance to befriend him, that maybe one day he would be comfortable enough with his faith and himself that he could worship quietly like the other parishioners? Who’s to say I’m right or wrong or he’s right or wrong in the way we observe? Should I talk to him about seeking a future leading a ministry, if he’s got that kind of energy to share?

As I said - I was raised asking questions. I wasn’t encouraged to fit a mold and it was just ducky when I made waves, which works out well because that just so happens to be a natural skill I posess.

I want these people to ask questions. I want them to allow themselves to cock their heads to the side like I did when they skipped the bit about Ole Abe and The Tale of The Wandering Pelvis. I want them to get fired up and be moved and to feel it and I want them to feel like they own their spirituality. I don’t want to find myself in a pen of sheep, stepping in their muck.

Over the years I’ve had at least a hundred conversations about blind faith, about it being as for us to explain and wrap our minds around as infinity. It’s a word and a concept that you think you know, but until you’ve experienced infinity, you don’t really know what it is, do you?

So yeah. This is a good chunk of why I’m spiritually homeless, and why, right now thisveryminute, I’m perfectly okay in my cardboard box on the side of the freeway. Because really, I like it here with the God I know, and I believe that if I’m patient and I work for it, and look for it, I’ll find the perfect house for me eventually.

Maybe it’ll be the one that sparked this post, maybe it won’t. Either way I’m glad that fire was reignited, and I’m glad it got me thinking. And I’m looking forward to that house, because it will be mine and I’ll have finally come home.