Fractured (I glimpsed a reflection in the gathered shards)

and I realized that it was me
I was broken
I was shattered
I was scattered long ago

and the visions I see in shards around me is not a lost God, but my soul (it is both)
I am not the only searcher, wading through the mirrors casting slanted golden light. I am not the only traveler, the only gatherer, stooping for pieces smaller than myself - we all of us are pieces

I am also a sharp-edged splinter, cast down with my brothers, my sisters, and in the confusion, I have thought they were someone else. I am a piece in the puzzle collecting.

The God I saw dispersed in shining lights,
As he was dispersed,
so the self I am familiar with appeared
and wondered

I call to the stars and they call back because we spoke with the same voice. They hear their answer in my echo.

In this moment, it is I who knows this.
But, soon it will pass and reflect from a different piece of fractured glass.

a crack around cracks around cracks
and so the light gets in
and we are dazzled

平江路上找到我心 Peace River Road

Sometimes,
I arrive at moments like node in which I feel that I am in just the right place for the life that I am in at just the right time. They are brief, but deeply reassuring.





As I strolled Peace River Road that night, I felt like a variety of obstacles were shifting and passing around me in such a way that for a few sweet moments, they were all absent at once, giving me a rare straight shot of perception and appreciation. Like all the clouds parting to expose a mountaintop for a few brief seconds, like realizing Mt. Hood through the trees, like flying on my bike around the curve just as the sun emerged on fresh rain and set the world a-dazzle, a clear sweet breath of something like freedom.















It wasn't hard to feel that I was not just at 平江路, but that it was I who lay comfortably beside the river, the bridges my arms stretched out across the water.

A single star peeked out at me from the beloved sky behind ancient rooftops



平江路 was just perfect. I almost felt that, when I'd been trying to get to China for so long, I had actually been trying to come to just this place at just this time. I thank the hand of God.



And I feel grateful to everyone who helped and encouraged me to get here. My Grandmas, Aunt Karen, parents, friends, colleagues, advisers, and also the support of my boyfriend. All the life that brought me here.





And that's how the changes go, isn't it?
They just go, sometimes, like tectonic plates. *Shoop* different.

merge the looking-glass

I was hovering above the surface of the water, on a ferry between China and Japan, contemplating the nature of my fear.

There was a time when I felt established in my concept of the world and of God, even if other aspects of my life were trying.
My concept of God was not unlike as a parent, encouraging me to grow and become spiritually mature and responsible, to stand on my own and no longer need parenting.
This concept began to erode and eventually decentralize, showering every aspect of the universe in a dazzling brilliance, as if to illustrate the riddle: Godisnowhere.
I described it to a friend once as though a long-time pen pal had written one final letter saying that I would no longer be receiving letters from them this way, and that they were not who I thought they were. I didn't know where to look after that.

This corresponded with series of other life-events that wrought general shattering of plane of my life. When I stand on one shard, I feel I have access to the life and memories connected to that shard, but not to memories or self from the other. It feels like it began the morning I was pushed through the ice into cold water and awoke, submerged in my lower bunk, disoriented, homesick for the first time in my life, and trapped, unable to go home. My room was an echo-chamber into which rocks were daily thrown. I first swam, then crawled out and learned to walk again over a period of years. I told myself that I could stay with things because if it ever became /that bad/, I was young. I could restart my life, and still live a relatively long time. In some ways I hadn't considered though, I had already started over, and shouldn't be too hard on myself for only being 5 years old. In the times I could not walk, I learned by being suspended from the mirror of the sky.

I still sensed within me an understanding and desire to know God's will and do it, and a trust that it would be the best way to live, but also a fear that God would call on me to give too much. But, in my difficult times, had not there been provision? Had it really been too much? ...it still feels difficult to volunteer for, although volunteering still seems like the correct choice. I feel conflicted, and I sometimes fear the voice in the sky, though I know that my pain is not from God, and instead, there was provision.

I am reminded the example of a child staying with a kind aunt while his mother is in the hospital giving birth to a baby brother. The aunt is kind, but the child cannot help but link her to the absence of his mother and may resent it.

I was hovering above the surface of the water, on a ferry between China and Japan, contemplating the nature of my fear.

I perceived myself two selves - one contained within me, and the other without. One, the concave reflection beneath the mirror of the sky, and the other spread broad and convex. One side of me, internal. The other side, more external. I perceived that my interior me feared the other, which also feared. A fear of harming, a fear of pain; a fear of abandonment, a fear of insufficiency, and both reflections retreating sadly from one another.

I perceived that these two aspects of me were interchangeable. And both feared. They might as well be one another. I perceived that they did not desire to fear, and that they should be friends. And they were. Reunited, I felt capable and confident in myself and in approaching others.

They were comfortable with one another for several days, until there was a test. I did not succeed, and instead caved and emptied myself like a ship trying to stay afloat, and failed to hold my sense of person, sense of limits of responsibility, and regard my sense of appeasement. I emerged from the scenario, but not with anything of value. I failed to keep from abandoning myself, and I do not know how to ask the reflections to trust again, especially when I am not capable of assuring their safety. They desire to trust me to manage, but I give them no evidence.

common assumption: other people think like you

I don't remember exactly which words he used, but the thought they said was:

A common mistake: assuming that other people think like you

I know that I have often made such mistakes.

Thinking about it further,
I realized that much of the way I thought of other people is out of a belief that the way others think is not so different from the way I think. It's a plank I often walk out on and usually find that it connects somewhere. I like believing that everyone makes sense to themselves and using that as a premise to work from when trying to understand. But, in retrospect, I think that perhaps a lot of what I took to be similarities were not so much ways of thinking, but content of thinking, or an ability to follow rather than produce an explanation when presented in the right way.

For example, there are some things that I think almost everyone has in common. Most people like to be thought well of, to feel understood, to feel secure, unalone, to have a sense of purpose, to feel able to express themselves . . . and so most people appreciate being encouraged or enabled to achieve these things.

However, these are things that can be thought of and felt, rather than ways of coming to or experiencing these thoughts and feelings.

For someone as process-oriented as myself, I'm a little surprised that this seems to be a new distinction. Even though I can recall people telling me here and there that they thought that the way I thought about things was different.

I had assumed that everyone thought about situations by imagining many possible outcomes and choosing one until a friend of mine commented that I seemed to think this way as if it was different than how she thought. (I am impressed that she saw this if it wasn't the way that she already thought)

I have been a little surprised by the number of friends I feel I know fairly well who have expressed to me a thought that I think similarly to the way they do and that they feel I understand them in a way many other people don't, and even choosing to ask me my opinion of if other people thought like them. I still don't have a good answer because I don't know how to assess whether a person thinks like another person. However, I am not sure if these friends would necessarily understand each other.

So far, this suggests that mutual understanding is not a transitive property.

I don't know where else to go with it yet.

learning

This week, I've been trying to remember that other people are often not so critical.

A good friend told me (about another subject yes, but I think it applies) that since a task I'd set upon was so difficult to accomplish, then there must be something amiss about the expectations. Either my expectation of what I should be able to do was unreasonable, or my expectation of the amount of time I would need was unreasonable and I needed to spend more time working on it.

I have recently been trying to remember that other peoples' expectations of me are not necessarily my own. This means that if I am disappointed with myself or my actions, then other people are not necessarily disapproving or thinking less of me.

I am trying to remember that if I am dissatisfied with myself, I should also credit myself with that opinion and not project it onto others.