106 - growing pains

the church i’m looking at is new, but the two churches in question are very old.

one is the oldest in lebanon, built on the ruins of a phoenician temple for a sun god; the other is in ruins, was built by crusaders, destroyed by mamlukes, rebuilt and settled by jacobites seeking refuge, because they believed in miaphysis: the one unified divine-human nature of jesus christ, then destroyed by maronite priests and cursed to never be rebuilt. legend has it that people tried to rebuild it over the years, but as soon as it came together it would fall apart every time. i want to film a video about this year’s alchemy program, what it’s about, how it works, etc. and i’m trying to decide where to film it. we filmed the course lessons last summer around this time, in different historic spots around the mountain, like the river in the holy valley where saint marina lived her whole life as a monk (no one knew her gender until it was time to bury her), and the cedars where gilgamesh came to slay humbaba. so for this introduction video, we wanted to do something that aligned with the course itself, and from all the places we’ve considered, these two churches have made the top two. let’s take a poll shall we? and if you have additional comments/ideas, please put them in the comments.

growing his hard, beautiful reader. growth is pain, nunu is reminding me. she has been growing so much since she got here. from the moment i put her on the carpet, she knew she was home. she’s racing across the living room to the edge of the couch and pulling herself up onto her feet, looking around and waving hii, heey. she’s playing and laughing and struggling to sleep. i’m struggling to speak because i sleep in the bed with her and daddy sleeps in his father’s room because we haven’t even had time to go get her a bed yet and we can’t all sleep in the bed together anymore. she and i can barely share the bed anymore because nunu doesn’t seem to be a bed sharer, nunu is a bed hogger, nunu needs the whole bed to spread herself out on like a starfish on her belly since she mastered the art of sitting up and rolling over. up until now, you could lay her down to sleep and expect her to stay there, but now she has begun to discover autonomy, she can lift herself up with her arms and abs, she can turn herself over and push herself onto her hands and knees if she’s feeling lazy (because lifting off her back is harder), and she can crawl right over the pillow fort walls. people say that children grow up so fast, but this is something other than fast, it is like magic, like watching time itself move right in front of your eyes. were we all this vulnerable? were we all this curious? were we all this capable? we must have been. we teach ourselves as if from scratch, watching the world around us, adjusting to meet what we see. nunu sees us get up and walk around but she hasn’t seen us pull ourselves up by the edge of something, she doesn’t see us struggle to pull ourselves up off the floor but she knows to find an edge and pull herself up by it, to bring herself to her feet. we didn’t teach her how to learn, no one teaches us how to learn and yet we learn, we teach ourselves. growing is painful but watching her grow might be even more painful, painful and wonderful and awe-inspiring.

anyway, beautiful reader, it is currently one am and i’m going to go lie down next to her before i pass out at this keyboard and hope that the growing pains don’t keep us up tonight they way they have the last couple nights.

until tomorrow <3