song for this world

There's a stone around my belly
Keeps me up at night
Makes me want to feed it
Makes me want to fight with the world
[ Lyrics from: http://www.cloverlyrics.com/e68984-darrell_scott~theres_a_stone_around_my_belly_lyrics.html ]

god tells us his grace is sufficient.  I like to think of it as more than that, as abundant and overflowing, and I know it is, but it is interesting that how he describes it is merely sufficient.  enough!  exactly enough.  when I want over-the-top and beyond-my-wildest-dreams, the heavenly hosts pull me back down with whispers of sufficiency.  and when I am bored and stagnant and can't imagine putting one foot in front of the other for one more step, it is still sufficient.  and when I am overwhelmed and spread too thin, sufficiency is still the name of the game.

Got a heart full of darkness
Got a headache full of dreams
Got a lifetime of memories
I don't know what they mean to this world
Is there a place in this world for a dreamer
If dreaming were all he could bring
Would you listen to a man with a stone around his belly sing?

my struggle is contentment.  I want it all at the same time and then I want it all to leave me alone.  it has always been this way for me.  I want to have grand adventures all over the globe and I want to settle down to offer my children roots and stability.  I want to live in a small town and I want the diversity and variety that comes with living somewhere bigger.  I want to open our home to those who need it most and I want to protect myself from the hurt and sadness that opening can bring.  I want to be valued and appreciated but I don't want to be blamed or used.  there's such a fine line between all those things.

There's a reason for the sadness
There's a reason for the song
I have reason to believe that i won't be too long for this world
Sixty years seventy-three if I'm lucky
Take this stone take this belly to a cabin in kentucky

but the important part is that it doesn't matter what I want, so much.  my plans aren't the important ones, my feelings of coziness aren't the focus.  this is all a part of it, this great tapestry my life is, the dissonance and the lack of resolution, the push and the pull and the tearing apart.  balance is a goal, but never a constant because the center itself if fluid and in motion.  and there is balance in the off-kilter teeter of my life.  that's all part of it, too.

Well I've been up on the mountain
I've been rollin' like a stone
Searchin' this whole world over
For a place to be alone
Alone to see the sunsets
And to count what i have lost
Alone to read aloud walt whitman
And to live like robert frost

so I will say yes to little babies that I might not get to keep.  and I will take the tears that come with phone calls that hurt more than heal.  I will love as deep as I can reach even when I know that isn't nearly deep enough, even when I know there are cracks and crevices I will never be able to fill.  even when the job is thankless and harder than I'd imagined I will do it over and over again because I know that there is sufficiency just in answering what I have been called to do.  and I know that it is part of my song for this world.

(lyrics by darrell scott.  see you in october, darrell!)

tribal living

I love my tribe.

I think it was friend who first introduced this idea to me: a modern day tribe.  the people you call when you have a flat tire, when you need emergency childcare, when only a beer on a back porch can solve your problems.  the people who call because you were on their mind, the only people you aren't bothered by when they drop by unannounced.  the people who help celebrate birthdays and just-because days, the ones that get the bad news phone calls first. 

I grew up surrounded by a tribe, although that certainly isn't how I thought of it then.  my mom has always said that my dad collects people the way other dads collected sport memorabilia or electronic equipment, but I think my mom did her fair share of people collecting as well.  the tribes of my childhood where families from church small groups, neighborhood friends, and the occassional colleague of one of my parents.  these were the families where we knew where they kept the silverware in the kitchen and whose dogs never barked at us because they saw us so often.  these were the folks we camped with, prayed with, potlucked with, and counted as our own.  my family moved a lot growing up, but we found our tribe wherever we landed.

my tribe in brevard is more tangled than anywhere else I've lived.  I've thought a lot about this and I think it is because our family has more needs than we ever had, partially because our family is bigger than it's ever been.  when I lived by myself in asheville, I only needed friends for me, and most of those friends were single folks themselves.  when it was eric and I together, we mashed tribes for a while, but married life parred down our tribal numbers, and only those that mattered most made the cut, I think.  the people that could value eric and I together and appreciate us separately are the ones that stuck around.  I can remember sitting on the porch at the HEAP having an in depth conversation with ally about who was actually tribe and who was "from a neighboring tribe where we have good relationships and intermarriage is allowed even if they aren't really our tribe."  my definitions were broader than hers, but we both counted each other as in the inner circle, and that is the important part.

now that we have kids, our tribal needs are different yet again.  and it isn't just that we need families with kids in the mix, although that is important.  we need people that get us, that value us, ALL of us; people that understand us as a family and as individuals.  people who have much to teach us and much to let us teach them.  our tribe is the village in which we are raising our children, the village where we are being raised as well.

I love my tribe.  I love that this is how my children are growing up, that they will remember people in their lives who were both their friends and their parents' friends all at once.  and my hope is that they will make finding their own tribe and a tribe for their own families the priority it deserves to be.