This is you. You are tired, you are weak. Occasionally, for maybe three days, you are filled with a surge of energy in all directions. You will do all the things - you will get all the things done that you have been meaning to and then you will be free. It must be those things making you feel like this. Once you do the things you will feel who you are more keenly, you will feel the things you are about - you will swell in your capacity to create, you will be unoffended by things that have nothing to do with you, instead of feeling like that is a capacity you should have, or have instead of the ones you do. You will suddenly be unmoored from all your comparisons, the strings tying you down to some potential identity will suddenly be cut - those strings tying you to many things, because you can't find a plumline vertically down to the solid rock, solid rock you know would feel better than "at least I'm not this", "I'm better than that", "I'm a little bit more nuanced than that'. You think you feel above all the people who know who they are - or who's personhood is so clear to you, the borders and boundaries of it - but really, all you feel is floating.

You miss your old self. Power, vigor, compassion, quiet - PEACE. A humming stillness of found in the identity of God. In truth if you look at it, you didn't used to know better who you were - you knew who God was. And it was personal. And it was personal to you. That was part of the meaning of the Love of God - the personal-ness of the personhood of God. The man Jesus was personal. Not only did he hunger and thirst, get frustrated or feel elated, feel grass, or the sheen of dust, or the temperature of wild water, or the myriad of currents in the eyes of his friends and the strangers around him - he walked with you in your life. He shared your nights of hopelessness, I held your hand in introductions to heaven, in books or dreams or actual travelling there. He was responsible for your Joys. Now, in a bitter resignation that knows it cannot really blame God for anything, he is the author (or silent witness to) all your lacks. This you know is not the true God. But you never really look the lies in the face to shut them out - its a feeling- the foundation belief of which you try to avoid examining.

You struggle to forgive - over and over again. There is a hard tin taste in your mouth. You live from a poor poor place. Poor towards everyone and everything.

Hard and beautiful gusts of wind come in - the voice of wisdom familiar in those who give it. You mother, your two friends - your advisors. No one is responsible for your life. Especially not your inner life. You know this is true.

You are Rilke's Swan on the Land, and no water in sight. You pray hard in fits of truth - to have the discipline for all the structures of devotion, to make clay pots, oil pots for God to fill - to actually pray, actually make a quiet space of medication, to sing a song frankly adoring God, from your belly from your throat. To read the Bible. When it comes to it, you always read about 3 sentences and completely fail to understand what is going on, what about God this is, or about you. You can make it through a song or two and its wonderful, and then you are back in your own presence, feeling alone, having stretched like a rubber band and come back to the same place.

The third man who buried his talent keeps ringing in your head. Not because you see where you are digging your life in, but because you recognise the attitude. That you know. You feel like that. You are loathe to give to God what you feel he hasn't done anything for, in your life. God himself!! Really?! But you feel like that.

Everything runs dry. You know, more clearly than ever, that all your springs are in God - because looking somewhere else has made you tired. The younger son has to be in it with the pigs before he'll go home to what was his all along - what was his while he was away from it too, what was not part of the deal when he asked for what was not part of the current deal. If you inherit from your father, that inheritance does not include how long he would have looked after you well - with friendship! - while you worked for him. (I'm sure he didn't hire the servants to keep you company. I'm sure you didn't get as huge a chunk of work as you felt tired you out). He doesn't take it away from you to give it to you later. A father is giving enough for now, and a great amount later.

If there's anything you've felt, its the 'not enough'. Boredom talks to you all the time - making you think there is a thing you are waiting for in emptiness. You've got to get through this to get there - and the "this" is something then that isn't enough, and a kind of life you don't have enough for.

You are reminded of the Spirit of God - loving, happy, patient, kind, gentle, faithful, good, full of peace, expressing all these through peace. There's an internal law that resists these - horrifyingly, that law lives in you somewhere, forbidding life. Some legalistic standard saying that something must be achieved first to have these.

So you have cast out that Pharisaical standard, a demon telling you your life is not enough, that you don't have enough, making you hopeless of an impossible standard.

But still, you don't want to be empty and free.

You want to be in love again. Young like that, free like that. Full like that, serene like that. In love, right in it, like in the water, in an on and through it, travelling, gliding. Like Rilke's swan.

There is the little ember - you want to be in love with one man, with one God.

He is real this God, sovereign, he must be able to gather all the lost sheep of your mindless, soulless distraction across the planes of your life, your perception of it, your thoughts. He knows you. He has loving arms. If he has been counting the hairs that have remained on your head, the years that remain in your head, and if He is the land of plenty, the loaded table between you and your enemies, he can sit with you, and eat with you. He is rest by still waters of love, green with forgiveness and new life, and in the right purpose paths. And you can be just a sheep - not beset by all these doubts of God's capacity to be a shepherd.

leaving

surfing change

my life is so weird. maybe just to me. haha, did you get that? (its also a reference to Fiona Apple's paper bag. which in saying that is also a reference to my coolness. all without even believing in postmodernism. ah, inescapable paradigm. well, i am surfing them too.)

I am surfing change i think.

Bati

today, the most eventful uneventful day ever. four hours prep for film shoot. car accident. co actor no show . discussion. what is even real?

I feel time like capsules i take to keep something going.

Living in Mongolia

Great! I finally found my way in a live (ish) text box. I hope it stays live, these are thought i wouldn't want to lose. I may have already! They always come cascading down while climbing the stairs, or rising up in the steam in a shower pour down. It would just be amazing to follow my own train of thought, instead of outrunning it, or literally building parallel tracks while i'm not looking. Coherence, clarity, keeping up.

I live in Mongolia. I live in Mongolia! And in the craziest life. Normal, running along a day, inside itself - but exploding into its own moments, sudden introductions, events, aural tones and the language of learning. at all times! I don't know myself here, maybe that's the triply starting point; i've nothing to know anything bye. And yet I'm still learning - and so the ordering of what gets learnt is somehow organic, untraceable, tangibly stored, gone.

I get in any car as a taxi. I think I've travelled as precious (I'd like to be alive) stranger's cargo in every hour of the day, literally. All 24 of them, for something, not knowing where I am going, totally at ease. Through amazing shortcuts and spaces you would not believe - taxi-ing in Mongolia is a crazy ride in visuospatial time-lapse. No kidding - your reaction time eases into this crazy rhythm they have here - a peace at high speed, like every turn and inflected direction is cued, all emotions are shared and zero-sum among all the drivers (nothing is personal, no wasteful emotion - fear, anger, entitlement, outrage, sense of justice, relief) - and all will be well.

Anyways, I get into any car - people just pick you up and take you wherever, baby on mother's lap in the passenger seat. How they make money at that cheap, i don't know. They talk to themselves and I understand undercurrent - or there is an ongoing, dramatic, dynamic conversation happening on the intercom, who knows where in the city which I'm crossing - shouting, placating, directions - conversation that I only just know the tones of. Everything is familiar, I recognise so much - I understand so little, and participate forever at a parallel, which swerves to a tangent. Who knows if I will ever be on the same line? Being so foreign has made fluid my belief that I ever am, even in my own country.

What does own country mean? I've heard so much more in the conversations I haven't understood - I've gone somewhere, instead of stayed.

Tonight I want to write everything -why do we espouse continuity of thought? Is your life continuous, besides it being you-  and who you are with? In my case - God is always present, and here I am. But i so often tap out of reality - tap out of that reality. Why is writing a discipline of continuity if really, you shouldn't pretend to have that if you don't? Can you write your way into ordered thinking, ordered being? Maybe you can! Writing surely is not about faking, but laying it bare, hoping you with your projected audience can come out with it, undo self-denial. Whatever. Happy whatever :)

So I trip in and out of meta-cognisance of language - that's one of the things i'm inputting constantly, but not controlling the ordering of the input. There's something I'm understanding - I'm learning to hear differently. Listening intently is exhausting - but I'm also learning to keep listening past non comprehension, all the time. Like, I don't stop at either words I know or don't know - neither is the goal - it all flows past me and i remember flashes of insight of it, split seconds after its happening.

I remember the first time I played basketball at school here, and the first few weeks of it - I felt like I'd come up from a hazy fog of foreigner floating. I was connected to all these men, we were a team (friggen heck we were warriors) and i knew what was going on, i understood so much, i was right in there with them. Communication was this heady symbiosis; and i felt like I was breathing again - people were clear and trusting me to follow them, depending on me.

What's strange in being a foreigner, what is isolating (though in the best intentions), is that nobody depends on you for nothing. In this game, they tried me, they tested me - and somehow by the grace of God there were times I was a total team mate - not the girl liability. Sometimes even an asset! Because the opposing team will give a wide berth - but a team mate serve me a cracking lay-up in the space. Basketball saved my mind first few months out here.

But besides that now I enjoy rhythms of language around me - I'm under them, beside them, I'm tapping in, I'm reading all the other stuff. Communication is amazing. Jesus could read minds, know what people are thinking. In normal talk in your own language, there's a heady mix of hiding, pretending to be saying something else, wanting to disclose and navigating social longevity, trying to hear by talking. Jesus knew what people where thinking. How often do you even know what you're thinking? So maybe you are telling it without, and before, knowing what it is you think in your heart. (This is where thinking happens). The heart then is something Jesus could read, while we let our minds shout over the waves coming from our hearts by understanding the words coming from other's mouths. Talk is just the overflow of the heart-what is in the centre of the full cup?

These are the things that fascinate me, that I get past and over myself to – the delight there – at finding I have a capacity for curiosity for things I did not dream up myself! The journey past looking through the files and junkyard of what I can perceive and have been perceiving for my decades…


I am happy to be in my own skin, overwhelmed at how much there is to me, at happy peace that I can’t get through it all, and I will meet him who can catalogue the soul with kisses on each thing he created and redeemed, one day, in the house we will live with all our brothers and sisters.

That's language. My lack.

I get into any car. I go to work events at 3 am. I sing in crazy full clubs - me, haha! Who totally bypassed and bypasses the currency - I mean the currency of nightlife. Well, I suppose I don't actually - I full on assert it, I am trying to engage in that language - be that good or bad. God and I were talking today and he said this is all wrong because of the way I am engaging with the world. I am mis-engaging with this reality, Misfiring. He is right, I mean, besides always being right. We will get to the bottom of it.

I went to a cafe/bar/dj place. He blows a whistle when the shots are served - genius. I drank strawberry tea and ate a strawberry, too. Does it matter? Time and time again I offensively refuse a shot (even when people don't go to jail - this time was to celebrate Henza not going to jail) - and refuse to give offence. There is a way to this. Its also just because they are mongols. People lean too close and I am always touching someone. Right in my face. There is this crazy-easy physical overfamiliarity which for the life of me I can't feel as gross or possessive - If it is that, then that is something deeper, human, that i want to see and believe in.

In other news. I'm a singer. I'm gonna act. I'm a primary school teacher to 17 tiny little people, the responsibility for and influence over whom I carry all the time, thinking, trying to understand, trying to do it right - making children like PureFirstLight and Pure Destiny both cry in one day. How did this all happen? Last week I was sitting in the quiet at a round wooden table on the southern tip of Africa, writing exams, holding a cat, eating mielies, getting browner skin. Now I am here, kicking up white sparkling sonically brittle ice dust, breathing in cold and walking alone at all times of day and night. My producer did not go to jail today! I might make a movie in summer. We might all hit the road, me and the boys (the team!) and drive to India! Russia! Wherever! Life is free. Might shoot video #3 In SA! Might live in New York. Maybe all together!

Might give it all up. Get married and have a baby and then some. Might do all of that.

Might stay. Stay with Jesus. Stay here, now, and find myself in a here and now, in a future suddenly right under my feet - still here and now, with Him. That might is all His.  

   

Lest I forget, my dreams are coming true in this dirty city

in the following ways.

1. Classless society and friendships in the grocery market and Sunday Plaza. An apple from my friend who has ginger and thought i wanted his number, and apple and a smile and a brotherly wink. Being asked what song will i sing next cos his wife saw me on TV on the popstar competition.Giving a photo to the lady of her and her nephew or Grandson. Being told by the sneaker man over and over again that i am pretending not to understand - liar, liar! he says laughing. 10 000 tugrik discounts just for indecisiveness.

2. Basketball with the boys. Being on the receiving end of respect and awe and admiration, and shouts of slam dunk, and surprise, and then even impressed-ness beyond surprise. Teaming up with a friend and winning 9 games. playing without girls. Thinking you are going to die at the hands or a mongol warrior and then playing alongside him as an opponent, deft, fearless, and he playing his game good AND with an awareness of you. NOTHING, I mean NOTHING, that helps not being esteemed by a guy you've loved like being admired by your friends on the court, and freaking holding your own.

3. Singing. performing. local pop star. Like, recognised on buses and 'let's be friends i saw you on TV and i like having foreign friends!!". SInging a really hard song, practicing korean dance moves, and my voice actually getting better cos i am practicing every day - working at something hard that so isn't work.

4. being paid, accommodation being paid, school bus paid, living alone, beautiful sunlit apartment, opposite my favourite maze of a shopping centre with the best kimchi and always has ginger

5. Studying a degree that will help me all over the world - being paid by school

6. In a church were I feel the love every sunday, and don't have to listen to the sermons because I don't understand them.

7. Learning to walk with angels. stop time. Change the weather. Go into the heavenly court about my messes which are colossal.

8. Exchanging my terrifying incomprehensible sins for his beauty, seeing him.

9. Out of the blue friendships with expat women who are like me, who like me, who lead me, and have the sincerest relationships I have ever seen with Jesus, still working it all out but really in their own way, personally, and not by rote of any denomination or strictly according to a school of thought. Humble, open, independent, my teachers, willing to hear me and take from me -crazy.

10. The most beautiful connections with friends in London, Dubai, Amsterdam, Riga, South Africa. The coolest mum ever. My best friend.

11. Mongolian children love me, hug me, kiss me, say the funniest things to me, miss me, give me style and posture advice. Whom I can watch, engage with - the best working environment ever - a working environment which is genius, ludicrous, silly, super-alive, loud, quiet, difficult, incomprehensible, dramatic, beautiful, cute, changing, sad.

12. Exciting new challenges like forgiving assholes who are not really assholes, who are beautiful inside but did you wrong, forgiving myself for very very difficult to understand why I did that sin that hurt people, forgiving friends who are amazing but inadvertantly dump you, forgiving the inadvertantness (you wanna be anything deliberately, or i do, i think), forgiving whole cultures, trying to freaking LOVE. what the heck is love

13. Being independent. Being different, having wild hair, orange socks, less make up on TV, laughing loudly, grinning, dancing in streets, singing walking home, having neighbours knock the heating pipes for singing too loud.

14. Walking in dusk in the dirt and the traffic and the cold face air and crackling earphones. The birds chirping in patches in the dust. Brown and red faces. Style everywhere, on the non rich - real street style.

15. My life being mine. To live!

16. God, you are good so quietly. Are you humble? Are you kind? I like you.

i have figured out how to post another post!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

i am woozed with not accepting flu. again. more things about london and england

1. If God has given you the delicious grace of living and loving here, it is FUN to run through the rain when they shut the tubes down. But you might have to bat off flu.
1.2 The weather varies as much as Cape Town. But they heat their insides considerably, all the time (Like surely this is summer?). But you might have to bat of flu.
2. The further north you go, apparently the less clothes they wear.
3. I live with a Northerner, and i think she has turned the geyser down. She says i am too warm blooded. Fair enough.
4. No one knows what geyser is. Except for a Diamond Geyser 

I've spent about half an hour trying to find out how to post a post. blog a post. post a blog. suspect that might be my exact problem. no way to make interneptitude look cool at 23. no way to introduce subject more at beginning of sentence. es.

point: sugar is from the devil. i think. refined sugar is. This is an attempt to chronicle all the reasons why i will not, do not, have sugar. Anymore.

It makes me slump. I considered going to the bathroom to faint/nap in the bath. How is that any different from a cocaine come-down?! Leaving my desk at work to crumble in the loo??

Jesus said no. He did. When i figure out how to make this private i will go into a prayerful write on this when i can figure out anonymity settings. accusations against Jesus. ect.

its always not worth it, sugar, five minutes after it.

i have no self control. i figure, if i am having a little of something that is no good for me, i might has well have a lot. masses. sickitude.

its linked to depression. with all the rainy weather, do i really want to have less control variables, or however you say that in statistalk?

Its an idolatrous comfort source for me.

It makes me have more fat cells. or fills them.

it makes me so hungry!

it messes with my emotions and hormones.

its doesn't even taste that good. scrap that actually.

what about pineapple? cheese? steak? burgers? apples in creamy yoghurt? strawberries and cream?

oh, that's sold me. strawberries and cream. for tea.


all i have to do is outlast the urge along with a cup of tea. all i have to last is the cup of tea.

you know what? i don't even like chocolate. truth.