lost cicadas

"this cicada song could be heard
 all the way in San Francisco, I’m sure
 their pulses looking for home 
 but our backs are flat against the earth 
 to feel grounded in something pushing back at us
 it feels like I’ve been here a thousand times 
 for the first time. 
 and somehow, it’s okay. 
 this wind will carry you with me
 until our feet don’t tire from carrying songs
 what were never meant for us"

I’m lucky. The place that I work is only a couple blocks from the inner-most downtown area of my city. I’m walking distance from all the hustle and bustle I could possibly want to be a part of. But I’m also just minutes away from a grassy area hugging the canal, where I can feel a breeze that wasn’t meant for me pushing through some shady willow trees on my lunch break. A rare quiet space so close to downtown, even with everyone passing through in that noon hour.

It’s been awhile since I’ve taken advantage of this space. It’s been awhile since I’ve sat on those man-made boulders that form steps reaching towards the water. And it’s been awhile since I’ve been reading in my spare moments instead of doing anything else. But today the sun was too perfect and the breeze felt good on my skin, so I found myself walking the path from campus to that shady spot when I clocked out for lunch.

Have you ever had that gut feeling hit you that you’re exactly where you are supposed to be in that moment? Where you look up and just know that you’re going the right direction? The last two years, most of those moments for me have completely taken me aback. And most of them were in moments that I got to share with someone I love. Where we both could stand there and just sense that no matter what happened moving forward, we were right where we were supposed to be in that moment together. Well, I made my way down those grassy steps today and it felt like I could breathe again after holding my breath for far longer than I could have realized.

I sat down in the shade and started reading searching for sunday by Rachel Held Evans. It’s a book that I didn’t realize I needed until I really started digging in. It’s about loving the church, then feeling lost in the church, and looking for a way back into this thing that you temporarily lost faith in. Not that you lost faith in your beliefs, but lost faith in the systems that are cultivating the beliefs around you. I’m only about halfway through this story and it’s everything I couldn’t have asked for, but I’m glad it’s being given to me anyway.

The way Rachel talks about feeling so secure in her identity in the church and then losing that identity and trying to find your way back to it is something I feel so deeply inside me. Even outside my faith journey, I’ve tried to hold onto these ideas that I thought made me who I am but I’ve been realizing over and over that I have to let go of how I thought things worked and who I thought I was supposed to be if I ever want to reach myself again. That feeling of not being sure if you believe the things you tell yourself about who you are or the feeling of not being sure if the things you believe in are truth can be so disorienting. But Rachel said something that sums up my experience with keeping on with this work in progress anyway:

“It’s [searching for sunday] about why, even on days when I suspect all this talk of Jesus and resurrection and life everlasting is a bunch of bunk designed to coddle us through an essentially meaningless existence, I should still like to be buried with my feet facing the rising sun. . . Just in case.”

This idea is what keeps me going most days. That even though I don’t feel whole or feel like I’m where I’m “supposed” to be in my life, I still want to do what I can to get to that place because some day I might actually get there. That even though I know that no one has it together so it’s fine that I don’t have my shit together either, I still want to be a little kinder than I have to be just because I don’t know if the people I’m coming in contact with are struggling just as much as I am.

I sat outside and just felt like the cicadas were letting me – and anyone who took the time to hear them – know that it’s going to be okay. It felt like they were saying I am home, even in this grassy area. That even though I’ve been feeling a bit lost most days as of late, it’s going to be okay. At the beginning of one of the chapters, Rachel quotes Gregory Alan Isakov’s song “The Stable Song” by saying “I threw stones at the stars, but the whole sky fell” and I felt compelled to listen to it again right then. The six-minute song felt like worship when I was just laying on my back, listening to it mix with the lost cicadas.

I’m not sure why I decided to go for that walk today, but I do know this work in progress heart needed that grounding energy. I needed that breeze to remind me that things that leave us have a way of coming back. I needed to read the words that I read from this book.

I hope you find yourself where you need to be today too. I hope you feel as close to yourself as you can in this moment. I’m walking this mess of a story right alongside you.

"remember when our songs were just like prayers
like gospel hymns that you called in the air. 
come down, come down sweet reverence, 
unto my simple house and ring... and ring" - the stable song

Talk soon.