All the sheep have been counted. Tagged, numbered and tucked away. There's no more warm milk to be drunk. Only cold cheese left and that's less than useless at this hour. The safe and reasonable period for the ingestion of an over-the-counter sleep aid has obviously passed. It's 4 a.m. and I'm wide awake, after a few hours of tossing and turning, and at least one adventure out of bed in sleepwalk. On the moon. Moonwalk. Moonsleepwalk. 

It's no secret that I am living, partially-digested, in the belly of a whale. It stinks in here. What is that, seaweed? Gross.

This week, as the direct result of inherited generational Appalachian poverty and a lifetime of poor dental care, I had a tooth extracted. (My family has always had dental problems. My mom and I walked into the kitchen one sunny afternoon to find dad doing some amateur dental work over the kitchen sink - he was trying to super glue part of his bridge back in when mom and I caught him off guard. Seems he had been periodically re-securing the faulty piece now and then, but this time he'd accidentally glued his finger to his lip. After we caught our breath from laughing, we found some nail polish remover and helped him get unstuck. And I believe I recently mentioned Great Aunt Kniecey, who removed all of her own problem teeth with a pair of pliers and a mason jar full of moonshine.) But I digress...

To say "extracted" does not do justice to the complexity of the procedure. It makes it sound as if my tooth were plucked out like a turnip from some soggy ground. It was not. It went like this: First the dentist (oral surgeon) said: "We're going to need to break your tooth in half and take it out in two pieces. Now, you're going to hear some noises." And then I did hear noises. Ungodly noises. Creaking and cracking like the felling of a tree. The dentist was a lumberjack and my tooth a mighty Sequoia. (He was wearing a flannel shirt and a toboggan hat at the time.)

And then he started tugging, to no avail. And then digging. With a "two-tipped root tool", as he called it. I was completely numb, of course. (They always give me shots of novacaine and wait for it to take effect, and then ask me if I can still feel it. I always lie to them and ask for an extra shot, until I'm confident that I wouldn't notice being hit in the mouth with a steam shovel.) The digging didn't seem to be going as expected, and the dentist looked down at me and said, "We're going to have to drill." He looked just like the Angel of death, surrounded by the halo of light from that special lamp they hang over the dental chair. I tried to pretend like I was excited about the drilling. I felt like I needed to encourage him so he wouldn't be nervous and would do a good job. (Plus, suicide rates are so high among dentists nowadays - I'm nothing if not a giver.)

Soon the drilling gave way to a subtle exasperation. And the dentist said, "Wow, that tooth is really hugging the bone." And I envisioned my frightened molar clinging for dear life to my jaw bone. And I found myself suddenly meditating, almost praying to my body to let go of the tooth. I had a gentle chat with my jaw about the importance of knowing when to let go. (My jaw sneered at me, as if to say "look who's talking!" - because, if you don't know, I don't know how to let go of anything. Ever. Literally, never. I just don't. I never have known when to quit, or how to let go. It's weird.)

For the first time, I had a deliberate and rational conversation with my body. It was a little like talking to a familiar stranger. Like that guy I used to see on the train every morning. I didn't quite know him, but there was something familiar about him. That's how I felt about my jaw, and my tooth. As if they had wills and desires all their own and I'd made some wild executive decision without their consent or knowledge, and now my dentist was using dynamite to blast the tooth from it's place. Like an unexpected eviction notice, but my tooth fought back. And I was suddenly a little bit proud. And a little relieved to know that there was at least that much will left in my body.

Finally, my jaw relinquished the molar. And the dentist wiped a bead of sweat from his brow. My jaw had been a worthy opponent. And, as it turns out, despite generational poverty, poor dental care, and less-than-stellar examples of home-style dental work, my roots - both Appalachian and molar - run deeper than expected. And that's comforting.

I'm left now with an empty space in my mouth. An empty space that will forever remind me of the battle between my flesh and the world. My sequioa and my lumberjack dentist. And how fleeting and fragile are these bodies - these jars of clay that contain our souls. I'll send my tongue now and then to stand in the empty space, and I'll spend time there mourning the loss of molar #18, and having a little more respect for my body - which worked so hard to hold me together on the inside.

A month ago I started writing this piece (and I never finished it, even now - so don't get your hopes up as you reach the final paragraph. I've decided to post it because few things are ever truly finished anyway, right?) It originally began with the casual statement: "People say some lovely things to rocks and mountains." But now it does not begin that way. Now it begins like this instead:

Conway Twitty said, "Listen to advice, but follow your heart." ('Course you can't go by him. He borrowed ten dollars from Grandpa Turley at a truckstop in Jackson, Ohio in 1952 and never paid it back.)

A friend told me the story of a sixteen year old girl who recently ran away from home. "Good for her!" I bellowed. "No!," he hollered back, "She should not have run away!" Well, now that depends on what one is running from, eh? I'm certainly not one to flippantly suggest that wayward and truant youths be left to their own devices, but I say: the arduous thing is knowing when and how to make one's exit from a situation. And sometimes knowing when to leave is far more valuable than the lessons that may have been learned from enduring whatever might have been endured. Other times we reluctantly recognize what we suspected all along: that the only way through... is through. This is where I find myself now.

Often in my life I have felt that the places where I have landed were somehow predestined. Maybe this is some sort of carryover from my evangelical (read: fatalist, apocalyptic) upbringing; "It's what god wants" (- a more arrogant statement was scarcely ever uttered.) Still, opportunities to learn and to grow and to make an impact are all around us, wherever we are. I've never been able to capture that idea in any sensical way. But there's some truth there, I know it. (As Over the Rhine put it, "the road's been my redeemer, I never know just what on earth I'll find. In the faces of a stranger, the dark and weary corners of my mind.")

Suddenly everyone I know stands on the brink of extinction. Stressed out and stretched thin. Working so hard at jobs we barely have the capacity to care about. We are so compelled, so industrious and so motivated (by what I don't know.) And often to the detriment of our relationships and wellbeing. What holds a lot of us in place, I think, is a certain fear of losing our livelihood, our ability to make ends meet and all. (I would argue that this fear is directly related to our real separation from the sources of our true life - our food and shelter. No one grows his own food and no one owns her own home nowadays. Our foods are the genetically modified, mass-produced and heavily-processed products and property of multinational conglomerate corporations; and our homes are in the hands of banks, and our claim to them is as thin as the coat of paint we've splashed on the walls to make them our own. In times past, if you lost your job, you had your home. If you lost your income, food was growing in the back yard. And what of us now? No one I know could survive a month without work or the aid of a line of credit.)

We toil in the menial and the meaningless, bearing stress and distress, fatigue and failure.

And for what? When did work become our religion? When did work become the thing that generates and rules our lives? We tell ourselves, "let me get through this week, this project, this event, this report, this quarter - and then I'll be fine. Then I'll live." But we know full-well that when work is completed, it is replenished - often twofold - by more of the same. I have left jobs behind me that I was sure they wouldn't find anyone willing or able to do. And by week's end, another sap was sitting at my desk pushing the same papers that gave me paper cuts just days before. (I know that sounds unsanitary.)

It can be a dangerous thing to begin to think realistically and literally about the value of the work we do. To pose the question: If I died today, what would I have regretted spending my last days stressing over? Sometimes life naturally hurls this question at us, when a loved on gets sick or deported. Or when we find a moment to breathe and take stock of how we’re spending the only life we’ve been granted.

Lately, I'm bouncing off my own existentialist questions like a trampoline. Turning flips in midair and collapsing back into my heap. What if I was taken suddenly, terminally ill. (Or what if I were suddenly poached by a collector of rare animal pelts?) What then? What would I be stressed about then? How would I wish I had done things differently? You hear about people who have life-changing near-death experiences. And they are suddenly know what to do with their lives. A friend and I recently rambled into a conversation on Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning - and discussed Frankl's assertion that we are each meant, designed and equipped with the skills to do some thing. And we struggle through our lives until we identify that thing, and do it. But until we do, we vamp. We work jobs that displease us; we feel dissatisfied and discontent. We throw away our time and energy on projects that don't make sense for who we are. We rant and rave and rage about what we have become.

Yes, we rage. That's not to say we're going out and slashing tires and burning down our neighbors houses. But we rage inside. I have finally admitted my own rage to myself. Over the past several weeks I have raged against my creator. "But I know thy dwelling place, thy coming in, and thy going out and thy rage against me." Isaiah 37:28 Yes, of course the God of all Creation should know my dwelling place, and would be aware of my every move - coming in and going out. But, why oh why, should the Ancient of Days recognize my rage against him? Who am I that my rage should reach the ears of the Almighty? What sort of god is this that would recognize the breath of a child against the fiercest winds of a hurricane? What god is this that would search out the solitary tear of her child from the salty, billowing waters of the deep?

But, hey, it's not incumbent on me to define who god is. Thank god.

Time and again my rage runs headlong into god's goodness. For it seems that every time I reach my wits' end, burdened with many afflictions and plagued by sleepless nights - I am rescued back from the brink - sometimes by god herself, most often through the people around me. People who love me enough to whisk me away from my troubles; or to tell me to shut up, and change the subject when they've grown weary of hearing about them.

My friend Belle once said that it wasn't so much that she needed a partner, or a boyfriend, but that she needed someone to "bear witness to [her] life." And that so succinctly summed up much of what I hear from friends and loved ones around me. To bear witness to life is inherently more than simply perceiving, it implies (indeed, requires) participation. Witnessing is the beginning, what follows is the celebration, and commiseration in life's path. On some ancient parchment a man wrote these words, (and a thousand years later, another man read these words and said, so poignant are these words that they must have been breathed across the lips of God.): "Weep with those who weep."

And, I say, rage with those who rage. Get involved. Don't mind your own business. Participate. Create community. Care about somebody in a deeper way. Life is a team sport. And some days it seems I may have shown up for a football match wearing ice skates and a blue sequined leotard. We need each other.




"If I sing, let me sing for the joy that has borne in me these songs; and if I weep, let it be as a man longing for his home."