What is brave?

 I don't know what brave is.

Somedays brave feels like not giving a shit what the nay-sayers say.

Some days brave feels like putting the black lives matter sign in the front yard.

Some days brave feels like going to that protest knowing the worst is possible.

Some days brave feels like the most heartfelt apology to those I love.

I don't know what brave is.

Right now brave feels like not giving our child a cell phone, demanding alone time, and relaxing enough to laugh from the gut.

Right now brave feels like feeling joy, and acting joyful and being happy when I feel happy.  I trust people who can be sad. I trust people who know the plumbed depths of loss and grief.  I trust people who have never lobbed a trite idea my way.

But joy 

Deep joy

 Deep joy that honors the complexities of loss and sadness and racism and unsurprising awful injustice and still survives:  That is the joy I sometimes feel.  That is the joy that feels brave to let out of this lovely fat body that holds it all.

I read in the NYTimes magazine today a quote (but here I will posit it as an idea because I do not have it in front of me) that the opposite of faith is certainty.  That doubt is actually the mechanics of faith that propels it forward.  This was from an interview with Ken Burns.

It is so so good.

It is so brave to have faith that is nourished by doubt.

When I was in my early 20's I had a group of middle aged adults who rooted for me and called me brave.  Brave for living abroad, brave for moving to New England, brave for projecting myself in to a life I wanted.  Maybe it was brave. It was also a desperate clawing way to get out of the cage I was suffocating in.  

With fewer cheerleaders along the way, I can still say that

I am brave now.

I am propelling myself into a life full of faith that is using doubt as its fuel.  I am brave, again clawing myself out of an institution that has been suffocating me. 

The turns that decisions I made when I was 23: to move, to pursue new people, new ideas, new education, new location, seemed easier.  They were easier.  There are systems set up to launch 23 year old, white, college educated, cis, closeted bi people.  As long as I pretended I belonged in all those systems then they launched me.  It worked, and I navigated those systems with as much integrity as they allow.

But now I am in the place where culture asks us to stay in the cage.  I am supposed to stay in the cage of performative motherhood, justice, Catholicism, ministry, blah blah blah.   But I'm not staying here.  I can't.  

It feels more brave to put aside many of the identities I've nourished and cared for and say, "I am done."

My ego is as tiny as it ever has been.

And I am more certain of who I am.

In about 8 weeks I will plant a garden again.

I will not plant any squash.

Not a zucchini, not a butternut, not an acorn or spaghetti or delicata in sight. 

I am tired of watching the bugs devour squash vines.

I will not keep planting what cannot grow.

Those seeds belong in another gardeners bed. Not in mine.

In 8 weeks I will try my hand at collards, and okra, and bell peppers. 

I will plant things into the soil whose future I don't know.

I am not brave.

I am pursuing deep aliveness.

And maybe that is brave.