Heights and Depths

This morning marks this blog’s last day. Sad? Mmm, sort of, but we’re growing apart, this blog and I. Everything is marvelous when I’m out of place or isolated and need space to reflect on how that happens and why, but I’m just not in enough pain often enough to continue on with it. The posts, you may have noticed, have gotten consistently shorter, shallower, and more spaced apart over the past six or so months. I can’t relate to the person that I was when I began here, and that has everything to do with the conclusions that I’ve reached since then.

I belong in small towns. It’s places like those where, as Tocqueville observed, our republic is most alive. Limited spaces make sense to me and, more often than not, contain those people who share my sense of the right.

I will always read and write lots and lots. But it doesn’t have to be earth-shattering every day. It absolutely does have to be beautiful and meaningful every day, but it’s also okay for me to write about the day-to-day and all the things that make me happy and affirm me – not only those that disturb me or make me uncomfortable.

White is as important as color. Nothing is more pure, more balanced, or more whole. White contains everything and yet is stained by nothing. That being said, color matters. This blog helped me figure out how to find the white spaces in my life; now I’m ready to experiment with hues.

God gave us everything and demands nothing less. My whole life will be spent figuring this one out, but I at least managed to get started on it this year. Now for the rest of it to unfold …

I might start another blog that goes with the things that I’m doing now. I love the blogging community that I’ve found here, and I like having a space to collect all of the words that flash through my head during the day. If so, you’ll probably find that one the same way you stumbled upon this one. Thanks for sticking with me – this has been a really great experience.

The Care and Keeping of Your Sanity

Several large, glassy moments stolen from the middle of the day hang weightily around my head and shoulders as I take advantage of their fullness to whisper with God over coffee in a windowed corner of the cafe. Daydreams and bright bits of future make their way from the pages of my letters to Him to my head and finally into my heart, where they glow warmly. I dream of white walls and breezes in the curtains and my own slip in the harbor, of my practice and all the unique opportunities for service and for love and for growth, of music and books and photographs, of a bright bundle of family and friends and peace under cherry trees.

When I found myself browsing Northern Michigan waterfront real estate, I realized I may have a problem. I need to come to terms with reality: the fact is that I have three-and-a-half more years of school before I can even think about moving up there.

But the dream is important! (Watch me argue this point with myself …) Oswald Chambers says that daydreaming can be useful, as it helps you formulate a spiritual game plan. And, as I learned and am learning from Wendell Berry, homes are important in that they provide a setting for your life. I’m discovering with greater clarity what shape my life should take, and this inspires in me a combination of peace and anticipation that I’ve never before known. My life is unfolding rapidly and will start coming faster and faster every year. What’s wrong with looking ahead at the spaces I’ll need to frame it?

I also found the firm I want to work at. It’s in Traverse City.   🙂

Sudden Summer

Fifty-degree air floods through the window and whirls heavily about the room, eroding the deafness from my ears. I lay perfectly still under the covers under the window under the moon, where I can see a wash of clouds breaking in frothy waves over its brightness. The permanent echoes underneath wisps of memory called back by what it means to live in summer, and all the newly-thawed sounds come as surprises to my senses. I hear the sound of my own grateful breath as it draws deep 0f the cool gentleness, faint trails of ecstatic music chasing the open windows of nighttime drivers, and, most of all, the wind. It shoves roughly through the trees in abrupt gasps that rush away as suddenly as they came and leave me  ready to run.

Anticipation is the best part.

Sunshines Up and Down

It’s a quiet afternoon where I sit, curled comfortably between the warmth of the sun and the warmth of something else, something as important. Both gifts from the Father, gifts that wander down from the Father of Lights to find me warm, safe where I had only just moments ago been cold, cold. Activity out the window and activity on this screen capture attention and distract it around the people who move to and from the booth where I fled to find inspiration in the middle of this morning, but my sunshine walls stay and their brightness holds me up.

I’m writing lots and lots today, finally catching up on all of those words that fell through the cracks. I ought to be in Texas listening to my brother give his voice recital, but I couldn’t get a flight … so today has to be enough to make up for what I’m missing, and it absolutely is. God knows how to bless me. The problem is, though, that I don’t always know how to have the blessings.

Sad, Sad Neglect

The light blaring down around me as I weave between snowdrifts has apparently by-passed the sun’s mitigating effects and dropped directly from Heaven – its brightness blinds me to everything but the shine of snow and the breath-taking sensation of iced air burning through gaps in my several layers. My hurrying feet hesitate before the heavy basilica doors, but only for a moment. The doors close behind me with a careful thud, and I gasp into the incense-scented darkness for several moments until a gentle glow appears as my eyes adjust. The towering golden tabernacle swims into focus, followed by the bright blue bases of the towering columns. The stained-glass windows sharpen next, throwing the Stations of the Cross into sharper relief. Finally come the baptismal font and the murals saturated richly into the walls and ceiling. I have no place else to be but on my knees for the better part of an hour, so I duck into pew and reach for Great Aunt Bernetta’s gentle old rosary. The words that leave with me are tucked between pages lined with a swirl of heavy handwriting that only vaguely resembles my usual light cursive, but I don’t have time to wonder when that otherworldly brightness confronts me again.

So many other inspirations have been distracting me.

I’ve been reading Julia Child’s  semi-auto-biography (she co-authored it), My Life in France. I’m only into the third chapter, but I’m already fascinated by the spiritual geography that she encountered there, and shares with us in vivid, elegant prose. My favorite thing about her writing, after the gorgeous imagery, is the glamorous-yet-reserved tone with which she describes an experience that she positively gobbled up … it gives one the impression that she was the kind of woman who could take everything in huge bites and still manage to look lady-like.

Surprise

The iced air shimmers in the dark, heavily laden with a flood of frozen glitter. It powders the stained-glass night with excitement and brilliant ideas, flashing hard in clean flurries under street lamps. The moment feels like the first breath after a happy surprise, when the air that finds your lungs leaves its promises behind to warm your heart. Your eyes were made for sights like these, and you revel in it even though you hear the rustling reminder that it’s only paper. The shining world that unrolls beneath your feet is only a fragile layer of distraction, and your rigid, pointing fingers put holes in it. But – careful! You’ve heard the paper tear before, been the only one for him to clap his eyes on in the single terrified glance left to him before he’s gone and the wind rattles the edges left ragged by his drop out of the wrapping-paper world. You lost him, but gained a precious glimpse of eternity in his passing. So you keep your balance, or are given it, and with two big pieces of spiritual scotch tape make an x-marks-the-spot. The work is hard, because your fingers are nearly frozen, but, finished, satisfied feet carry you safely home.

Things around here are finding their ends, which mostly means that we’re all starting over. It’s a lot of back-tracking to find and conclude the ideas and relationships that were important to us when we got here, in some cases dusting them off or being surprised by what they’ve morphed into. A lot gets dropped during this process, which is okay, too, I guess. That’s how you figure out what’s really important to you – also a surprise, sometimes.

It’s unfamiliar spiritual geography. I’m nostalgic and restless, anxious and unconcerned, frantically busy and utterly unoccupied. The season is changing, and it caught me unprepared – or in denial, during the moments when I’m honest with myself. I had determined at the beginning of all of this to love it and live in it for as long as I could, and ignore the pain of leaving until after I left. But the leaving will be the hardest. I have found that God has left me remarkably well-equipped to make good out of any situation: it’s the space between situations that leaves me scattered and scared.

But tonight I heard the paper rustle, and I remembered. The world is so perfectly wrapped that you know beyond a shadow of a doubt who prepared it so carefully for you, but the gift is that God decides when to rip the paper away and expose you to your eternity. If I give in to fear at any point, and in so doing deny the promise of God’s protection, where then may I finally draw the line? Our choice on this paper planet is, finally, between fear and faith.

Genius

Excerpted from “Feminism, the Body and the Machine,” an essay by Wendell Berry.

” … At first glance, writing may seem not nearly so much an art of the body as, say, dancing or gardening or carpentry. And yet language is the most intimately physical of all the artistic means. We have it palpably in our mouths; it is our langue, our tongue. Writing it, we shape it with our hands. Reading aloud what we have written—as we must do, if we are writing carefully—our language passes in at the eyes, out at the mouth, in at the ears; the words are immersed and steeped in the senses of the body before they make sense in the mind. They cannot make sense in the mind until they have made sense in the body. Does shaping one’s words with one’s own hand impart character and quality to them, as does speaking them with one’s own tongue to the satisfaction of one’s own ear? There is no way to prove that it does. On the other hand, there is no way to prove that it does not, and I believe that it does.”

 

The rest of the essay can be found here. It’s long, but well worth the read.

Empty Asphalt

Today, the words used to describe me are not the words I would use to describe the person I aspire to be. At least, they weren’t this morning. Not sure exactly what I was hoping for, but what I got was “intimidating,” “guarded,” and “business-like.” These shocked me. For all they may reflect the way I act, they describe the exact opposite of how I feel. Then I began to think and realize that I’ve spent so much time lately (read: since the LSAT) thinking about what I want, that I’ve lost sight of who I am and it’s affecting my behavior.

Frightened, I turned to the books of Psalms and Proverbs, where I promptly became even more overwhelmed by my own selfishness. The writers here praised God for the many gifts that have been given and focused on the kinds of prayer and service they could offer for the edification of their homes and communities. Here, every kind of trouble and complaint is handed over to the Lord – whereupon, presumably, it is left. Given up. Let go of. When was the last time I did that? I cling stubbornly to my heavy load of things I don’t know how to handle, without knowing why.

So, today is for today. Not about graduating in the spring, or working through the summer, or starting law school in the fall, or graduating into a big question mark three years from now. Today is for observing the Sabbath. Today is for easing out from under the crush of self-absorption and cynicism. Today is for embracing my companions and the Mysteries that bind us. Today is for calling on my Wonder Counsellor, Her0-God, and Father forever.

Music and Lyrics

I wake to the sound of the trailer door slamming heavily against the iced-over parking lot. The truck cab rocks slightly as my father moves around inside the trailer, checking on the sleds or something. I peep out from where I’m curled under a couple coats and find dawn winds whipping in savory oranges and bleary pinks over a battered dune. I can hear them sandblasting the boardwalk that leads to the beach and breakwall and begin to catch their restlessness. I check my cell phone out of habit, knowing full well we’re miles away from any chance of signal. The only thing it’s good for now is keeping time. 8:17. A snowmobile roars to life, and I hurry to slip into my coat and boots, knowing that miles of untouched trails wait, protected from the lake’s ferocity by thick layers of Northern Michigan forest.

Lights twinkle gently on frosted trees in our yard as I write this, and my mother is humming in the kitchen as she fixes up our Christmas leftovers into her legendary pea soup, green like dune grass and so thick your spoon’ll stand up in it. I’m caught somewhere between playing uke and editing photos, but my head is three hundred miles away and high on diesel fumes. I want to be home with a vengeance, you know? Nothing like going deaf on a frozen trail in the middle of nowhere at 107 mph to let you know you’re back where you belong.

Black and White World

Snow … I could be home anyplace where I wake up to four inches of icy purity.