Waltzing through Babylon

As an aside, this whole blogging every day thing is great, but it is cutting into my sleep. This is maybe not quite so bad. Before I was blogging, I was up late trying to fill the emptiness. Now I'm up late spilling out the overflow of heart & thoughts... So if I'm missing sleep, at least it's for more positive reasons.....


Again today, common themes seemed to appear in multiple places in the day. It started with e-mails to two friends (the only spare moments of sanity I had in an otherwise busy day at work). One was talking about the stripping away of all that we think we are, so that, in the end, we may discover who we really are. The other was noting a random observation I had about the wonders of non-verbal communication in partner dancing (which, in the end, I didn't communicate very well).

In my brief & limited exposure to partner dancing, I found it a marvel that somehow you could lead a person by only subtle pressures of your hand on their back. Mostly it made me admire women for their ability to follow the subtle leads. I figure I'd likely never catch most of those leads & would need a sledgehammer to move me.

What was more amazing to me was the way that, over time, my friend/dance partner & myself were able to sort of learn each other's 'language'... in practicing together, there were places where we could learn to communicate better between the two of us. We could work together to listen & explain to each other the subtle points of what each movement meant, or how an intention could be better communicated....

For me, this was a beautiful, marvelous, mysterious thing. As a writer, I live in the world of words. They are my tools for carrying out the work that I do best. They are the media through which the Word becomes flesh, where the thoughts, feelings, impressions that come from me or from the creative wellspring beyond all of us flow out & become visible to others.

Words are powerful. They can shape nations or tear them down. They can start revolutions, start romances, start revelations... they can move us, inspire us, challenge us, wound us.... but for me, as much as I rely on words, especially the written word, I find that words are really weak to truly explain what it is that we really want to say (hence why i spill out a lot of words - it's a vain thought that if I spill out enough of the words, maybe something will make sense to someone who reads it)....

... spent this evening with another friend, who likewise spoke at length about the stripping process in their life. Then we watched the movie Babel, a movie all about communication, or rather the lack thereof. It's a very picturesque movie - beautiful scenery - but the lives of the people all seem really bleak. It's a whole 2 hours of miscommunication after mis-communication. Where you find that even the people speaking the same language can't really understand each other.....

.... thoughts of this intimidate me to no end - they scare me.... Babel was the first kingdom of antichrist, the first place where humanity banded together to overthrow God's rule in their lives... It was the kingdom of Nimrod, the hunter of men's souls (Genesis 10:8-10), and all through the Bible, all through history, Babel seeks to extend it's grip on the planet.... but, as the story goes, Babel was the place of confusion, the place where God gave men other tongues, other languages &, in theory, we haven't understood each other since....

....though the reality is that the problem started earlier, back in Genesis 3. Before humanity chose isolation over relationship, man & woman lived in the garden 'naked & without shame'.... they lived a life bare - body, soul & spirit - before each other & before God. There was no secrets, no facades, nothing to cover up the pure truth of who they really were. After they ate from the tree, relationship 'died'...fear & shame entered history & we've been hiding ourselves from each other ever since.... and mis-communicating since then....

In the movie I kept thinking, "Stop, just say what you're really thinking" or "Stop, listen to what the other person is saying/not saying." As a passive observer it's so easy to analyze someone else's miscommunication patterns.... but as I look at my own I think about how badly my miscommunication operates & this makes me wonder if any of my relationships have hope to be whole/healthy (friendships, family, dating/marriage, children, everything)...

Going back to the thoughts on fighting - when I get into an argument/fight, my INFP personality, which is superb for helping others, betrays me & I fall apart. The introverted side of me feels trapped. It feels like my brain is working in slow motion & I can't think of the right things to say... & I just want to hide, process the issue & come back when I've got something intelligent to say. The reality is though that my brain's not going in slow motion, it's grinding away so fast that it clogs everything. My iNtuitive/Feeling side is proposing things to say & throwing them out 'cause I instinctively know how each statement is going to affect the other person & most of what I think of saying doesn't seem to help make the conflict situation any better. The perceiving side of me starts to see all the angles & the other person's point of view & all the ways they are going to shoot down anything I have to say & this further adds to the paralysis....

Normal conversation sometimes isn't much better...

We tend to attach so much of our identity to our words. Each of us gets ideas & because they're 'our' ideas, we attach our worth, our identity to them. Then we package these ideas in our words, send them out into the world around us, like letting loose a dove & then we watch as other people shoot them down... then in these moments we feel not only misunderstood, but attacked. We feel that our hearts are not heard because someone didn't embrace our idea, come across immediately to see things the way that we see them.....

...this further exacerbates our lack of communication 'cause we don't really try to get around the miscommunication. We react with hurt & fear instead of explaining ourselves again, or listening to another's perspective.

And at the end of the day, all that each of us is really trying to communicate is, "do you love me?", "am I enough?", "do you want me?".... at the end of the day, we are all looking for the people (& deity) with whom we can go back to the garden, where we can be naked & without shame. stripped of all the defenses that we put up to protect our fragile view of ourselves.... At the end of the day, we want to be heard, to be understood, to have someone that will listen & hear the heart behind the words.....

....and again, this brings me back to the dancing... the true communication is not an instantaneous thing, not even with soul-mates, as rare & as wonderful a thing as that may be (& some days believeing in the concept of soul-mates feels like believing in unicorns (which I kind of do))... For all of us, communication is learned, we have to stop to listen, to speak, to slowly build our own 'language' with each other - to not take for granted that we understand, but instead, to painstakingly create our own rosetta stone, our translation key, for those we love so that we can slowly learn to interpret what each other is really trying to communicate.....

...the tower of Babel ultimately is torn down by love, brick by brick.... It's the confusion that stops us building - the heartache of longing for relationship that helps us realize that we are made for intimacy.... but it's love that helps us tear down the place of confusion, the walls that have separated us from God & from those we want to love... it's love that helps us learn when to move, to sway, to spin, to twirl.... it's love that helps us learn the steps of the great Dance, the romance of life.... but it is very much a slow, humble process, coupled with a lot of silence, a lot of listening & a lot of learning to communicate with & without words....