wait.

I am so impatient for my words to come back that I can hardly stand to read.

I am so impatient for my wonder to come back that I can hardly stand myself in the world.

I am so impatient to feel small and reverent again that sitting in a forest would break my heart; I need a forest to sit in.

I am so impatient for strength that I can hardly rest.

I am so impatient.

But there are deep breaths and there is focus, and there's no room for impatience here.

Impatience is not for a grown woman; it's the luxury of children. It's the charm and frenzy of little people whose lives are still just small backyards, with no capacity for enduring long swathes of landscape. No understanding for what it means to wait, to do the work of waiting, in a life so short and small.

So. I'm waiting.

Enduring. Focusing. Breathing. Practicing these things. Practicing it all.

It's a crazy thing, a weird thing, how waiting also means resting: a weird thing, to have to learn how to rest, as though resting were something to resist. To learn that part of resting means to temporarily set aside the things that derail the waiting. A crazy thing, that some things are not for right now, and that's okay. The sweetest relief I've ever known in my life, to allow the focus to shift from DO IT RIGHT ASAP to pace yourself for the long-haul, kid.  

Because God is changing my life. I am changing my life. And none of this can be done quickly. Can't be forced. Can't be made into something it isn't.

This will not be right without waiting.

I will not be whole without waiting.

I will not survive this without waiting.

This is it; The Big One, as they say.

I will either die in half-wait, or be made invincible by learning how to wait; this will either kill me, or it won't. It's all I can do.

So I'll wait to speak, and I'll read the conversations I can't yet join, let them help build their truth in me.

Trust inspiration to the times when it smacks me like a semi, and trust that, someday, it will woo me again, if I wait.

Let the dust settle, let the bleeding slow, let the scars form, wait for them to become the words I know are blooming and kicking inside me.

Sit with the doubts in a concrete jungle. Say them out loud, every last one, to every last letter, and wait.

Recognize the work of remembering what I'm learning. Remind myself of what's new. Recite it, over and over and over and over again, a new language, richer and fuller and deeper than I ever imagined. Work to remember, every day, how old languages, as mine as my own name, can turn me back toward death before I even realize what's happening.

I don't think the old way of words will never come back; it's turning new leaves, as a book or a tree, as I wait.

The wonder swells up to my throat, and I begin to remember myself again, as I wait, and all I can say is oh God, thank you. thank you. thank you. 

The presence of God seeps from the hand-made, cracked foundations of this concrete jungle; it cannot help itself. It betrays its inability to contain a God who is more than his own strength.

The air is heavy with Everything for which I wait.

I don't wait alone. Which is kind of the whole point.