I need assistance with butchering.


Is anyone proficient at slaughtering?

Here's the issue: I need to learn how to kill the fatted calf. I am (hopefully, God willing) moving to Kenya for a while, where I will be working in a nation recently wounded by inter tribal violence. It is an area that needs the power of reconciliation. I don't understand reconciliation at the national level any more than I understand reconciliation at the personal level. I read Henri Nouwen's "Bread for the Journey" every morning. The dates of late July through early August find Good ol' Henri preoccupied with the return of the prodigal and the return of the "other" son. The "other" son is the one who did not turn away. At least not physically. His heart was hardened. I sympathize with the non-prodigal son. When I read about his plight, I feel the softest part of my heart surrounded by hardened scar tissue.

My brother came home years ago. After spending most of his adult as a drug addict, stealing from the family, and disappearing for periods of time, he came home....with lymphoma. He died five months after he returned. My mother relates this homecoming to the biblical narrative of the long lost prodigal child. I don't remember it that way. My brother never asked for forgiveness, at least not to me. Although I sat by his bed, cared for his two children, and cared for him like a nurse, I never reconciled with my brother. I dutifully cared for and silently hated him until his final inhalation of air.

Four year later I still have dreams that he is crawling out of his grave looking for me. I am annoyed at best, pissed of at worse, and I make haste to rebury him.

Maybe these nightmares will stop if I had some sort of welcoming home present to offer him, some grand tribute of forgiveness...say a chubby little calf to cook up?

I don't know what this metaphor would represent exactly (especially post-mortem) so I am left feeling like the angry brother in the story. I hope God has a special place in his heart for those who take weeks, months, or years to fully forgive.

i had a dream about tree branches growing out of my scalp as i attempt to take a shower. it terrifies me, so much so that it's difficult to even write about the dream.
why, i must ask, are tree branches growing out of my head? why am i so terrified?

"Object permanence is the term used to describe the awareness that objects continue to exist even when they are no longer visible. Jean Piaget conducted experiments with infants which led him to conclude that this awareness was typically achieved at eight to nine months of age, during the sensorimotor stage of cognitive development. The infant would be shown a desirable object or toy, for example, and the toy would then be covered by a blanket or otherwise obscured from view while the infant was watching. Some of the infant subjects would immediately exhibit signs of confusion or dismay. Piaget interpreted these behavioral signs as evidence of a belief that the object had somehow 'vanished' or simply ceased to exist."

I pray, before I go to sleep, for answers from my dreams. Usually, I choose one question or subject to meditate on while slumber seduces me. It has become an increasingly effective practice. Lately I have been praying for a sign about my engagement to my partner. I receive the same dream repeatedly, as though God, or my mind, is saying "I will continue to repeat this statement until you get the message."

In the dream I am separated from my partner by distance. I attempt to call my partner by phone, but keep dialing the wrong number. When I finally get through, my partner seems as distant emotionally as he is physically. I feel pain and panic. He remains unmoved. The phone cuts in and out. I wake up, sad.

To put this into context, my partner is looking for a job. When he gets it, he will most likely move. I am planning to go to Kenya this fall for three months. A long distance relationship is in the cards for us, it seems.

The thing is, I don't believe in long distance relationships. It's a strange cocktail that has lead me to this disbelief: One part cognitive error, one part crisis of faith, with a splash of insecurity. Distance confuses me. I cannot easily separate it from death. That may seem like a dramatic jump for some, but I can't force my mind to operate differently, so it seems. When I try to reach out to a person from a distance, I cannot shake that feeling that the person is permanently gone and I am in the denial stage of grief.

Immediacy is very important in my relationships. I am a tactile person and I need to touch a person to know that they are real and to ascertain that I have not suffered another loss. To love someone from a distance seems cruel. I admire people who can live away from their loved ones. However, I cannot mirror this. Something doesn't click in my mind and I torture myself with desperate attempts to connect to the person by phone, e-mail, etc., with the secret fear in the back of my mind that the person is already gone.

So my dream reflects my deepest fears and realities on the subject of long distance love.

I remain unconvinced that I am capable of it.

There is nothing that makes me feel more limited and minuscule than an abandoned newborn kitten. My partner found one the other day. It looked like a rat and had fallen from the ceiling of a barn. It was cold, weak, injured, and frail. It paralyzed me. I didn't know where to begin the ministering to the poor little beast. The wound on it's stomach? It's need for quick sustenance? I didn't sense it would survive it's many setbacks. So I stood with it in my hands, unable to either respond or connect with it, for fear of failing or having my heart wounded by it's possible demise. A soul can only suffer so much. In my professional life I have worked with people dying of AIDS, rejected by society, and offered no reasonable solution by the government for financial support or access to medication. I have traveled to Africa to witness the same conditions, only more desperate. In my personal life, I have watched two of my siblings be buried. There is only so much the soul can bear. I've survived, you know. And then some pee-wee rat of a creature reminds me of how vulnerable the embodied world is. How broken and needy. And mostly the pathetic little thing reminds me of how inept I am in the face of all of this. Yet I have to do what I can. So I take the mini-beast home. I give him a warm water bottle. I give him kitten formula and put neosporin on his wounds. He (or she?), at the very least, deserves a nice kitten hospice in my home. And I talk to him, if for no other reason than loneliness sucks. This is how I have to approach life. I have to minster in the small practical ways I can and let the narrative play itself out. I write this because daytime experience can be just as haunting as dreams. Also I write this because, as I mentioned, loneliness kills and hopefully you are reading this and you feel heartbroken and inept sometimes too.

I was published in the Jnauary/Febuary 2008 issue of Quaker Life. If you find it, get your hands on it. My article was called "Food for the Meantime".

My good friend Paul Eckert will talk dreams with me. If you can find a dream friend, by all means do so. Here are my general rules for talking about dreams:

1. Don't talk about dreams with your lover. They have an agenda. They want the dreams to be about them.
2. Find a dream friend who really believes in dreams. Anyone who does not believe that dreams are either the mind communicating with itself, or even better, the voice of God in crazy, creative symbolism, is a real downer.
3. Also, don't spend too much time with people who have boring dreams. Boring people breed boring dreams. Another downer. Paul is not a downer. He has dreams about Jesus that entertain me and freak me out all at once.
4. Brainstorm with each other. Throw out ideas and then throw them away if necessary.

Paul and I both dream of log cabins. Apparently, according to Guru Paul, log cabins symbolize the womb. This is interesting since I have been highly attracted to log cabin patterns in my quilting lately.

You are welcome to dream about log cabins as well. It's quite pleasant. Give it a try tonight. Use this photo as inspiration.

Lately I have been blessed by a vivid dream life. I have been dreaming of dark charming Kenyan men and colorfully painted houses. Along with vibrant playful images, I have also been witness to a picture show of more disturbing sights. A woman is present in my dreams, a figure that I try in the nighttime to fight, destroy, befriend, avoid, humiliate, or comfort. She is present as someone I do not understand and cannot control. And caterpillars. There are an army of caterpillars inching through my sleep. Caterpillars, a creature I loathe during waking hours, are usually found in my dreams as a symbol of dread, or warning. I don't know why my dreams are plagued by such menacing little beasts. I can only imagine it has to do with the state of my life right now-unhappy in love, and with a case of the mean reds, to reference two Audrey Hepburn movies.

There is a poem by Hafiz, the Islam Mystic entitled "And a Big Herd of Sweet Goats", from the collection "The Subject Tonight is Love". The poet speaks in first person. He describes how he walks in such a way that makes the mountains want to follow him in his joy and the planets change their course. To finally illustrate his point, he states that his energy seduces a herd of sweet, lively goats to trail him. I read this and immediately thought of my friend Elisabeth Beasley. An enigmatic, musical existence, she likely has a fan club of goats tagging along with her right now as I write this. I was pleased by Hafiz's use of the goat in this poem (in Biblical imagery goats are often unfairly cast in evil roles--you know, sheep go to heaven and goats go...elsewhere. By they way, you too, can stop goat discrimination, blog to follow). Mostly, however, I was pleased by the thought of living in such a way that attracts anything sweet and lively to surround me. My dreams are plagued with unpleasant creatures (but hey,one woman's caterpillar is another woman's goat). The way I walk right now, I imagine a sea of angry rabid chihuahuas yapping about my ankles.

In Barbara Kingsolver's novel Animal Dreams, the narrator believes the dreams of animals are reflections of their day time existence. If a dog chases rabbits all day, it's doggy legs twitch in sleep, reliving the pursuit. Human dreams are not so different, she contends. We dream what we live.

I happen to find dreams a little more prophetic. However, I see the relevance of her assertion. I am uncomfortable, distrusting, argumentative during the day, at night I find myself in the same spaces.

My desire is to find a way to live and love that allows sweet goats follow me in my dream scape and in my most alert awake moments.

i must broadcast my kenya obsession via the world wide web.