nearly a year...

It doesn't matter that it's been nearly a year since I've written in this blog, as I'm the only one who currently reads it. I am making myself sit and write, as I can't seem to do anything else. As I go through the motions of the day, I sometimes find myself reflecting on how another blogger wrote about a similar thing, and how much more glamorous it seemed in words. I don't think putting into words is going to make dumping the last of my very large bag of frozen beans into a steamer pot just to get rid of them any more glamorous than it already isn't.
I find myself hungry all the time, and I realize, it isn't really a hunger for food. (Though I try very hard to ingest all manner of food and the like to quell said hunger.) Wanting very much to maintain my current pant size for financial as well as vanity reasons, I shove baby carrots in my mouth like a form of second breath.
This has got to stop.
I've been job hunting for far too long, and at times find myself completely paralyzed and unable to read another job posting. I need to revise my resume, but that same hunk of cotton in my head that falsely tells me I'm hungry also tells me I can't. Yesterday, my cousin posted a quote by Eleanor Roosevelt. "You must do the thing you think you cannot do." She prompted me to revisit the quote as I begged for motivation to scrub toilets and showers. My response was that I had read the quote earlier, and it inspired me to write a book, go to England to work on a movie and the like.
Now, if I could only apply it to resume tinkering, job scavenging and perhaps just writing a blog post let alone a novel; perhaps then I could do the rest of the things I think I cannot do.
Like, make a difference in the world. Oh yes, big leap here. My said hunger above is not a hunger for food, or even for romantic love; it's a hunger for Love. God love. I don't just mean a warm fuzzy feeling that He loves me; I mean something infinitely greater. I mean His Love that touches all. Sometimes I get frustrated with the amount of navel gazing that goes on in my life, and I perceive to go on in the lives of those around me. Of course we get frustrated in our lives. Sometimes our careers crash and burn, or never get going, the laundry never seems to get done, s/he just doesn't understand me; all things that make you go hmmmm. What if the whole world stopped, and collectively all 6,808,700,000 of us (Wikipedia, 2010) decided to just wallow in our pain and frustration? I kind of instantly saw an image of hell in my mind. What if half that number stopped and held the hand of the other half? It's still kind of a frightening picture to me, because even though it's nice to stop and hold some body's hand, there'd still be 6,808,700,000 people sitting around holding hands.
Where am I going with all this. To be honest, I don't really know. I suppose I am looking for balance. There's always going to be people who honestly need someone to walk with them through a difficult time, whether it be an entire country like Haiti needing help to rebuild after tragedy, or one very old woman alone at a retirement home. My soul hungers to both feed and be fed. Sometimes I really do need someone to hold my hand, even if the hand holding takes the form of a good long laugh at a bar. Other times, I want to be the hand holder; but I think here's where the real hunger lies; I want to hold some body's hand far away, outside my circle of comfort. If His love reaches very nook and cranny of the universe, then I want to be a part of that. I'm not sure how or what that will look like. I suspect it may be related to Dostoevsky's remark "beauty will save the world." Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's nobel lecture in literature begins to make heads or tails of the thoughts whirling in my head. In truth there is beauty, in truth falshoods are exposed. When falsehoods are exposed, they begin to lose their power.
When I see the beauty around me, I am not tricked into falsely believing the lie that the world is ugly. There are ugly things in the world, things we must expose to the truth. The Truth is, His love will save us. Sometimes it will be expressed in the soft light of breaking dawn. Other times it will be expressed in a late night vigil by a hospital bed. Feast on His love seems to be the answer, now where to pull up a chair?