Talky Words 

[This letter is a response I wrote to my Bible Study teacher, who asked the class what practices and scripture(s) have helped us to endure the long isolation of the covid-19 pandemic.]

I am a creative introvert by nature, so I spend a lot of time in my imagination, writing stories or making things for people I love. I like to imagine how a person will experience the gift I make for them, and I imagine them living moments of everyday gratitude for simple things, like sunbeams in their kitchen and the love of God burning like a happy campfire in their heart. 

But sometimes, after many weeks of contentment, I will very abruptly and with deeply felt sadness register the absence of gatherings in my life. 

At those times, the recurring image I have is one of a great sandstorm or blizzard coming over the whole land, and each of us, where we stood in a field waving cheerfully at one another moments before, now pull a sheltering blanket over of our heads and, grim faced, settle into the protection of our fragile dugouts. Some of us are alone, some of us have a small family nestled in with us, but all of us are sober in our awareness of what potential harm the storm brings. 

In the vision, though we cannot see one another, I yet feel a keen awareness of your presence nearby. 

And that brings me to the scripture that keeps me going when the going gets tough: The Nicene Creed. Here's how it goes for me when the alone-ness hits me in the gut.

"I believe in God the Father, Almighty maker of heaven and earth."  I bow my head, and take shelter from the storm beneath the blanket of His sure strength.

"I believe in his only begotten son, Jesus Christ, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried..." I take a deep breath and confess my fear of the unknown storm to my brother, lord and savior who intimately understands what it means to feel isolation, betrayal, pain, and dread.

I exhale again, remembering that the death of a way of life, a way of thinking, a way of existing (even physically) is not the end but a beginning of a promise fulfilled. "...and on the third day he arose from the dead. He ascended into heaven and sitteth at the right hand of  God the Father Almighty." 

Momentarily, I feel hope at Christ's triumph. He arose from the dead. That miserable ending was not the end, it was a passageway to the part where he arose.

As I worry about what comes next after this plague, after this aloneness, I take another long, slow breath and then exhale. Sometimes I cry. Sometimes I make sounds, sort of like singing, to release the tension that has accumulated in my throat and chest from keeping a brave face on for my kids and my family. Some might call it "non-accidental wailing," but I like to think it's my beautiful surrender song. 😁

"...From thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead." At this point I wonder, rather meditatively, what is quickness, and how much of what we consider "normal life" is actually "being dead," spiritually? 

"I believe in the Holy Spirit," the fire in my heart brightens with this phrase. 

"The holy everybody church," is how my mind pronounces catholic with a lower-case C.

"The communion of saints," which means thee and me--we're always hanging out with the angels and with each other, all the time when we're hanging out with God in the fire of our hearts!

"...the forgiveness of sins," and I make sure to let some stuff go right about now.

"the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting, Amen."  

At this last, I take time to envision what it would really look like? What would it feel like and live like if the body of Christ, all of us, got up as Christ? 

What if we let anxiety and inward facing concerns wash away like tears in the sea of His love, and rose up like an ocean of love in service to the people in and around Lockhart--who could use some loving affirmation and a helping hand? I just wonder, sometimes, if maybe we could take part in our own resurrection, if that, along with faith and communion and all the rest might be an intrinsic part, you know? 

Is getting up when everything has fallen apart and looks totally bleak an intrinsic part of life everlasting in Jesus? 

Finally, with my "Amen" I pledge my heart, mind and service to let this whole meditation / prayer / vision become so. 

Now, this whole prayer looks like me just turning off the news or Facebook, getting out of my chair or my bed and stretching my back, rolling my neck until it gives a little pop, and maybe doing a little side bend or side twist to loosen up. But, on the inside, the Creed helps me reset. It helps me stay grounded in my deeper purposes. It reaffirms my security in my community of sisters and brothers (that's you! the saints), even when we can't see one another on account of staying hunkered down in our individual dugouts.

At least our dugouts have the internet! 

That Spanish flu pandemic of 1918? Man, that was lonesome. Research that one if your grandmother didn't tell you something about it. And then call, text, or write (or video chat) a friend or family member to tell them how much you love them, how you like to imagine them making something beautiful or smiling at the clouds, and then tell them some of the beauty in your heart.

Remember always, God blesses you every day.

(c) Megan Creel January 24, 2021

2020 has been weirdly therapeutic for me. Not always comfy, but productive in setting aside time for deep prayer and contemplation of my whole life as well as my lifestyle. 

The Black Lives Matter movement ripped the social veneer off of friendships I’d trusted for years, and it also ripped the complacency off my own heart for politely nullifying my Black heritage for the sake of keeping other people comfortable in their bias and fear. 

To hear some say in so many ways that quality of life for minorities of all types is of lesser importance than “order” and “respect of property” demanded a reevaluation of what it means for me and my family to be alive, to feel the same faith and comfort in the American Dream as my “most patriotic” friends. 

There, all around me, everywhere I looked on social media or in the news was the signal that the lifestyle of one America was more important than the lives of multiple “other” Americas. 

I had to come to terms with and define my own blackness, and, for the gazillionth time in my life, address how to walk with it in self-love and legacy-love. I had to stop disowning blackness as if it were a bad dog that was keeping the neighbors awake at night. I was tired of pretending America’s race problem wasn’t affecting me.

Am I Black enough to wear braids or locs full time, or is that misappropriation? Is the constant drive “to be slender with manageable hair” winning me access to relationships that I don’t even want, or will it win rapport, solidarity and acceptance from successful people who can be important social allies for my kids? 

The more I meditated and prayed, the deeper my questions became.

Is the exhaustion of “what should I look like?” versus “what DO I look like” what God intended for me? Does my desire of a peaceful life graced by inward and outward acceptance actually matter? Does it matter to my chosen friends? Does it matter to me? 

If it matters to me (and it does) that my darker skinned family and friends face actual threats and menace to their physical, economic and psychosocial liberty every week, while my own lighter skinned struggle rolls out along lines of “merely” psychosocial malaise, what should I be doing about it?

For starters, I decided that my own blackness did matter to me after all. It wasn’t a cultural relic best disavowed and hidden away for the sake of relational “peace and progress.” It is a rich legacy that I cut myself off from, way early in life, as an act of social survival. So, for quarantine time, I “took my Black back” from whatever mental shelf I had put it on. I put my hair in twists and let them develop into locs, then made this declaration on Instagram:

I've wanted this for so long and held myself back because of what others might think or want... But you know what? I want my Black back. I tucked it away in a memory box as a child. I tucked it away in a segregated town where it was better to be White. I tucked it away in a school, and later a business culture where "my" "big crazy hair" was a plaything and source of entertainment for people who do not grow this hair. My blackness was not my own. My blackness was socially regulated and passed from hand to hand by others who had so much equality that my hair belonged to them more than it belonged to me. I decided this season that my black life is more than just my indrawn breath. My black life is an expression of the conjunction of all my families' legacies. My black life is the expression of my inheritance of body, mind and spirit. And it matters that I may joyfully celebrate and honor that inheritance with sovereignty and primacy over whoever else might also want to celebrate and honor it as mine, not theirs. It matters. My whole, intact, joyful black life matters.

I tuned in to podcasts and conversations, images and films that celebrated the joy of living while Black. I found out that, contrary to the oft-heard assertion that I was “different from the other Black people,” I really wasn’t. And I was overjoyed! I found and reached out to other Black and mixed women in my community and intentionally cultivated friendships of mutual support and celebration. At the behest of one of my friends, I started watching “Mixed-ish” on Netflix with Leora, and it has been the frame for many hours of deeply meaningful conversation with her on all aspects of personhood mattering.

Somehow, getting LASIK at the end of October helped more than I would’ve predicted. Getting those glasses off my face was one more degree of coming out with my real face, and it liberated my personal expression from an obligatory artifact. I can see, and that’s really great for a person who’s been hiding herself in plain sight for so long. ❤️

(c) Megan Creel November 22, 2020

At risk of coming across as Sanctimonious--and wouldn't that make a great handle for a chat room!--I shall now speak upon Honesty and Growth in a character. (I clear my throat, and improve my posture before I speak...)

Do you know, as hard as it is to maintain kindness and compassion for others under duress in real life, it is hardest for me to maintain a sense of kindness and compassion for myself when faced with my own imperfection? Yes, I have come to realize I did not materialize, fully formed and perfect from a sea of Happy Foamy Feelings, and it has all but crushed me to admit it...to myself. I am embarrassed, because everyone around me knew it and loved me anyway, but I seem to be the last one to "know" it, and the fact that my efforts to hide my imperfections from others were wasted just drives me nuts. I am, alas, imperfect and transparent, and I meant to be perfect and impervious to other's examinations.

Thankfully, I have found that I am anything but alone in my imperfection and frustration.

Thus, the next hardest thing for me to experience is picking up some form of entertainment by which to escape or to lift my spirits a bit, and wouldn't you know, the heroine in the piece is frickin' perfect? No, not just skinny, I mean she's small bodied (and I am not), she's never tired (and I am), her choices, both the ones she faces and the ones she makes, do not seem to upset her (oh, ho, and mine sometimes--okay, bullshit-- often they do), and, she never seems to experience anything more volatile than annoyance or a pissy sort of vengeance when she encounters a barrier or experiences a disappointment (and I burst into flames and thirst for the ability to vaporize people).

A great escape? Hardly. It's more a magnifying glass turned inward at every fault I find in myself.

And, if possible, it becomes even worse when I put on my Man-Colored- Glasses.

To explain, I consider it an honor and a privilege that certain men in my life have permitted me access to their hearts and minds with exquisite honesty, and from these men I have learned much about present day Honor, Duty, Strength, and, yes, Pain. It is with the viewpoint gained by their concourse that I try to look, and to write with my Man-Colored- Glasses.

When I look at that same entertainment, be it literature or film, even popular music, with my Man-Colored-Glasses, I find "myself" faced with a hero with a big dick, who has a bottomless source of money and a perfectly formed, tall tanned body he doesn't have to sweat for, who can make love in Mandarin, Urdu, English, Swedish, Finnish, French and seven dialects of Spanish, perfectly, all the time, every time, never blowing his load at the wrong time, who is never tired, never insecure, never bitched at continually by the woman he is with (or women, because, hey, he can have lots of them), and, IF his dreams crash and burn despite his best efforts, he can just move on, sparing one last sort of poignant look at his lost life, before proceeding with that infuriatingly hateful grudge that women find so irresistibly sexy. He's an asshole, and they love it. They eat that shit up like candy. Woo-hoo! What a great release from life.

And "I" will never be like that.

So, I beg the question, do we really want to be? If we just step aside from the Hollywood crap we are spoon fed, and the Western Civilization, Strong and Independent Contest to which we are carefully indoctrinated; do we really want to be like that?

Hell-to-the-No, is my straight answer.

My big brown ass is delicious, even as much as some travel-size white woman, or a tasty mouthful of Latina, or a lovely golden child of Asia; hot temper, crying spells, mood swings, conflicting feelings and all. 

And that man over there? The one who isn't six feet tall but he has a great smile and a rather ordinary dick, who works sixty hours a week (or more)? He's awesome! Even though he often feels like he isn't enough, that he isn't seen, that he isn't valued as the man he is? Even so, He Rocks.

We're real, people, and we are the heroes and heroines of life. And if we cannot be honest with ourselves, and with our entertainments, our dreams, we cannot grow.

Growth isn't pretty or comfortable. My family once kept a tarantula for almost two years as a pet, and when she grew, her shell ruptured. Say it with me, "Her Shell Ruptured", and she climbed out on weak, wobbly legs and just laid there for days, drying off, hardening up, Completely Vulnerable to death: even the tiny crickets we fed her could have killed her in those days of recovery. She taught me a lot about growth, and when I am having a "spiritual awakening", or a crisis, or a lesson in life (same thing), and I am seething with embarrassment or shame over my weakness, I think of the tarantula: Ruptured. Weak. Then Bigger and Stronger. In that order.

I am going to work on being as kind and forgiving to myself as I am of others; and I am going to keep keeping it real, writing work that puts real people in escapist scenarios, that celebrates what is human and great about them, and what is great about YOU.

Because that would be a treat. That would be some really pleasant entertainment.

(c) Megan Creel March 11, 2011