Pretty, inconclusive, bright things

I’ve erased two perfectly good posts already and am determined to publish what I type this time. This is getting ridiculous.

My conclusion after a weekend spent blessedly far away from the city, saturated with reasonably good music, floating on a man-made lake eighty feet above roads, bridges, houses and even cemeteries, surrounded by cousins whom I’d never met (but came quickly to love) and all of their dogs, is that I have many temporary conclusions.

Temporary conclusions work. We’re young and won’t want them any more inflexible than they already are. I have concluded, temporarily and among many other things, that it is time to allow a degree of inconclusivity into our life – “make room for the Holy Ghost,” I’m told. As in, leave room for His influence in your life. When you try to operate with lots and lots of facts (as many of us, products of the Information Age, are apt to do), you become paralyzed, distracted or overwhelmed. Try something new, something that helps you get to the heart of what you’re trying to do with your life. Start a list of the things that you want to pull inside it, and move through your days with words like “God, pencils, Reykjavik, love, blue” to inform your plans and goals and interactions. And then, just let things related to these things happen to your life. You can shift and make adjustments, but you’re not crippling yourself by trying to string your days out along this narrow time line. You’re whole. With a few important things in mind to keep you on track.

As for me, well, Reykjavik probably won’t happen anytime soon, so here’s a list of significant and reasonable words with which to end the summer: God, oatmeal, persistence, Grand Marais, bright.   GOPGB. Um … memory device to follow.

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Palabras

I love words. Written words, sung words, whispered words, words of prayer, words in Spanish or Turkish, God’s Word, all those perfect at-home words unique to the Northern Michigan dialect. Sweeping phrases and simple chant. Sign language. Well-placed remarks, sarcasm and dry humor. Poetry when poetry is called for and good, plain language otherwise. Words that aren’t particularly inspiring in and of themselves, but that, when spoken, draw you from the dark into another warm heart. I love every sweet and steady word that comes from inside a favorite familiar mind, the good fruit of a humble heart and well-ordered intent. I love the things we say to encourage and edify one another, the excited frenzy of phrases that tumbles into the bright space recently vacated by a wash of laughter, surprising everyone. I love the delicate art of spinning words into perfect and palpable stories, the ideas and sensations that accompany a tale well-told. The words that teach and challenge are wonderful, and those that hush and comfort are among the most dear.

Sometimes, though, I’m not sure what to do with all of these words and the things they carry. I keep a blog, a journal, a quote journal, a planner, a calendar, and a flurry of Post-Its in an attempt to contain them. I write them out and file them away – otherwise they simply hover behind my eyes and keep me up at night. It works, for the most part.

As for the words that fall through the cracks – texts, facebook messages, even most email (trend!) – I don’t know. A lot of times, I just let these go. Sometimes that hurts. It’s true that we are, to some degree, responsible for the words that other people give to us, for the meanings they convey. So, although the ability to tap out a thought and put it in another person’s hand within ten seconds of thinking it is undoubtedly very useful, I’m left with a hundred messages that meant so much to the sender – during those ten seconds.  For so many of them, the following seconds, those in which the thought was relevant, have long since passed. So these words remain heavy, glowing reminders of things that someone only meant for a moment. That’s when it hurts to let these go.

But when is paper any better? I have a long mental list of letters I’ve written that I know are forgotten, or, which can sometimes be much worse, well-read and worn and reviewed over and over. I’ve collected a lot of notes and cards and letters, too, many of which I know I’ll never be able to open again. The idea that you write something down precisely because you expect to mean it for a very long time makes the paper even harder to carry when the expectation goes unfulfilled. But I can’t bear to get rid of these. I can’t tell where the responsibility for these others’ words ends.

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“Steady as a preacher, free as a weed”

The scraggle of weed clinging stubbornly to the impossibly narrow chink of soil between the fence and the patio suddenly blossomed into a huge, healthy cloud of delicate green fronds.Waves of thunderstorms spilled their nourishing waters all night long, and now, a day later, this whispery individual seems to display the determination to live for the sky, having found the strength to surpass a simple subsistence.

There’s something so genuine about a weed – its honesty frees it. It’s just trying to get along, trying to live and draw meaning from the ground in which it grows like everybody else. And it’s sort of inspiring, actually, in its ability to shoot up overnight and hang onto its progress despite the dry and the heat. A few more showers will leave us with a veritable bush, tucked neatly between slabs of concrete.

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Celebration Arches

Common knowledge and shared history tells us that the head is the king of the body, and I have no wish to dispute that metaphor here. But consider the beautiful structures upon which your body rests, the vehicles by which your thoughtful head is conveyed about its realm. They press again and again to the ground, the earth that reflects the mind of the Father and the very work of His hands. It is by the labors of your feet that you come to see and thus to understand the labors of your God.

I look down, at long, skinny toes, impossibly high arches, chipped purple polish spread across ten curved nails. The inside edges of these delightful necessities are rippled with callouses from doing laps of the Capitol and last summer’s long runs along Hudson River trails. The soles are tough from months spent running barefoot up and down a gravel road I know by heart. Heavy boots have protected the delicate veins and even skin from a hundred miles of frost-bitten snowmobile trails. This is what I look at.

And when I look, I see a hundred lovely things. I see dust from Turkish caves clinging in dun waves, notice the way they’ve gone pink in the freezing waters of the Euphrates. I see scuffs from new and unfamiliar sailboat spaces, and the delighted dancing motions that accompanies a walk down my very first cobblestone street. I see subtle burns won under a Barbados sun, and grass stains from a romp out near the button swing. Slight swelling from hours on the football field.

Imagine your feet, the paths they trace around a turning world. My feet remember so many motions. They trip and twirl across dance floors and stand firm and unafraid on the stage. They hurry to hug cousins and trace slow circles in Chesapeake sands. They love to stretch out extra long strides in a new pair of running shoes. They rest in front of the firepit. They step confidently aboard airplanes and impatiently on the accelerator, anxious again for home.

Now think of all the places your beautiful feet have yet to take you … I toy with the idea of great, vast Colorado spaces spreading out beneath these curious wanderers, of them whispering through warm and ancient cathedrals, of them being confronted by jagged, permanent mountains.

Perhaps along the way, our feet will meet.

Where will your feet find me?

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Squeaky Green

My daydreams swirl gently between the dust motes hovering in the bright heat that spills through the skylight. I lay still, barely conscious, and wish for two or three more blankets – not for their warmth but for their weight. As it is, I’m not sure gravity will be able to secure me. Even now, I seem to levitate against the comforter’s gentle anchor. Each heartbeat brings with it the legitimate possibility that I might suddenly slip free the planet’s grasp and float off into a corner of the room. The mere fact that this didn’t happen during the last instant has no bearing whatever on the potential for such an occurrence during the next. A moment and an hour later, the alarm shrieks, and the hand that reaches for it feels heavy.

When I was a little girl – a toddler – I was afraid of grass. It was such that my parents used to be able to spread a blanket on the lawn and maroon me there to play while they worked in the yard, confident that my fear would restrict me to the confines of my cotton island. Now, don’t get me wrong: this practice didn’t scar me or anything – I actually find it pretty funny and love to listen to my parents laugh as they recall the memory.

Needless to say, I’m not afraid of grass anymore (rather, the sterile stretch of stiff fuzz on the floor of my cubicle and the fluorescent  glare which serves to render it visible have me craving the sensation of those silky blades between my skinny toes like never before). But the root of the fear hasn’t gone away. I’m still afraid of getting dirty. I fear the discomfort, the unclean sensation that comes with the awareness of having done something wrong, of having neglected the health of my soul. The word used in the Catechism to describe this state is “disordered.” And I can’t shake the association. Messes make me twitch. Dust, clutter, waste, germs, stains – wrong. I am not obsessive compulsive. But I do make my bed every morning, carry a small bottle of hand sanitizer, and derive a real sense of accomplishment from washing dishes. I have always taken pleasure in creating order. Only today do I recognize this behavior as prayer, as an attempt to reflect or approximate the tender care with which God arranges the myriad details of our daily lives.

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Threads

What does blue make you want to do?

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Ebenezer’s Freezer

I love the way you laugh. Something strikes you ridiculous or ironic, and, in one sudden, fluid motion, you’ve tossed your head back and are gasping back a stretch of coffee-scented sunshine air before becoming overwhelmed by that wonderful sound. It’s an audible grin, a sung shout, animated bliss, and I can’t help but succumb, as well. I feel my eyes open a little wider as a grin finds its way to my face, and then I’m lost, doubled over in fits of bubbly hilarity. After you leave, I spend the rest of the afternoon in near-perfect silence, resting my lips against the curves of a remembered smile and letting the sound of our laughter trip dizzily around in my head. It hums along pleasantly underneath Ingrid Michaelson and Jack Johnson, and stirs another smile to my face while my hands swirl pages around my busy notebook.

Summer days in Washington are not like spring days in Washington are not like winter days in Washington. I measured the winter days in hours, and nearly every set of sixty minutes seemed to take me a very long time to complete. Each had a distinct character and offered something different to my cautious mind. They rippled along the edges of my life, tugging silently at me under shivery gray skies. Spring days, though, were backwards and easier to manage – they held still so that I had to tug at them. The sky came grinding to a halt as if it was afraid to turn for fear that all the baby sunlights would go dropping down out of it, and all the world seemed stationary and silent while the city worked itself into a near frenzy on its crisp surface. It was too difficult to watch and too convoluted to understand, so I got on a plane and few far, far away. And then, when summer came, I came, too, and now everything’s different. The heat drives everyone inside so that I mostly have the sidewalk to myself when I hurry down my shady street, and the days plummet away, one by one like rocks dropped off a dock. July comes careening into the office like that staff meeting we all forgot about and now I’m in a rush to dash off this post so I can catch up with the holiday weekend. Celebrating our nation’s independence in its capital city? Exhilarating.

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