Deadlines

I yanked the front door open this morning and gasped when I saw stars, hard and clear, piercing the pre-dawn darkness with a ferocity I’d never seen this far south. The beginnings of this day stood in deep navy contrast to those of yesterday, when I made a shadow in the milky, silty light that filtered down through a dense layer of swollen clouds. No two days, no two hours fall through the pages of my worried planner the same way, and that is the best thing.

Three things redeemed the earlier part of my day:

Coffee with milk and a shot of pumpkin, and a loooong letter from Miri that I’d been anticipating for days. The third thing was an awesome breakfast date with Gwen, but I will spare you the sight of myself at seven o’clock in the morning.

The afternoon was much better. Classes went well, work went well, and now I’m home:

Look at the pretty things happening on my wall! Yesterday’s near tornado has leftover winds positively thrashing the tree outside my window, but it makes for some absolutely beautiful, shimmery shadows on the wall as I write this.

Not much to say today – there’s too much to do, and I haven’t had time to reflect much on it beyond repeatedly shouting “Awesome!” to myself and to God every time I realize how wonderful and overwhelming the days here are.

It’s mostly a potential day today. I might score well on the LSAT, I might have the makings of an awesome senior thesis on my hands, I might be going abroad to work this summer, I might have another sweet campus job next semester, I might get one or two or three or four side projects published, and I might absolutely will become a country music star and go on tour with my band.

I’ll keep you posted on how that last one turns out.

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Idea, Revisited

My place sees me wondering about it, preparing to paper it over with an essay and a thesis centered on aspects of its character. It returns the attention aggressively, assaulting me with bright and hard-edged situations and fresh ideas about old locations. New books and new people and new songs leave traces of friendship everywhere and give me reasons to stay up late at night and wake up ready, in anticipation of dawn.

I love it when, in describing your ideas to other people, you discover new things about them that you weren’t actively aware of before. I clarified a few things to myself by talking about them to other people over the past few days, which is immensely satisfying. Discussions about art and architecture and how spiritual geography ties into that – more on that later.

I have to get used to a new kind of activity. Father Charlie describes Our Lady as being in a state of active waiting – she was busy being obedient and faithful and expectant of huge and wonderful and mind-blowing things from God. (I love to imagine how brilliant she must have been at Cana … “Um, Son? Do something.”) So I can be doing things even while I’m not really doing anything … I think. I’m still trying to parce this one out, because I am all about getting stuff done, but my understanding of “busy” has been informed to a large extent by the rest of the world.  Same word for a different concept. I need to be relentless in prayer, and active in my response to God’s call, “Come Unto Me.” This task is much greater and much more difficult than the glamorous projects I envision for myself, and how much more beautiful. This is the “spiritual” in spiritual geography. This is the kind of thing for which we need a place.

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Hello, Hello

The idea sweeps over my notebook as I languish in class, stiff under the neon lights and garish glow of the projector. Ugly yellow slides rattle across the tired pantalla – what’s the word in English? I should have slept more last night. My caffeinated brain sends quivering signals to the nervous fingers that tap-tap-tap until long after my wrist begins to twinge with the repetition. Suddenly, London and my fuzzy conceptions of it begin to play out in the front of my mind, a transparency over reality that soon becomes more lifelike than the space I occupy in this odd little room. Cinderblock walls seal off the bright fall that glistens under the morning outside, but in here time is stagnant and stale and it’s only the possibility of the wider world under my feet – someday – that keeps me breathing. The lines on my notebook look like the imaginary latitudes that divide up the globe into perfect puzzle pieces full of God’s artwork.  I trace them with my pencil, wishing my feet could follow.

Anybody want to come with me to London this summer? I sat in class realizing that, beginning in September 2011, my life is going to be committed to work and and school continuously for about five or six years:  three years of law school (in which clinics will occupy my summers) and then a couple of years of hard, constant work (to pay off the debts I incurred while holding unpaid clinic jobs in between three fifty-thousand-dollar tuition bills). So this summer is very important, because it’s going to be my last chance to submerge myself in some gorgeous place, to read and think and photograph and write and learn about big, important, pretty, honest things. I have this idea that I’ll live and work in London, take weekends to explore the UK, and save two weeks for big trips to places like Reykjavik and and Manila. Or Rome. Or Athens. Or Prague. Oh my goodness. I want the world so badly, and that’s a bad sign. This Earth is only a foretaste of the things to come – I need to suppress my restlessness and remember that I’m suppposed to be working on getting back to where I came from. That will be the most real, most exotic, most familiar, most wonderful, most dear place – let me prepare my soul for that.

See why I need a travel buddy? MIRIEL!!!

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Quiet Pages

Unison voices blend under the merciful vision of a man whose belief stands openly on his face. His awe and conviction are extant and just beyond reach; they draw him just a little above and away from us. The room falls to its knees under the Mercy, the call is renewed and a Voice admonishes me, “There is no coincidence.”

Weekday Mass is always a compelling experience. Sometimes the reading is just what I needed to hear, sometimes there are lots of brilliant little children people, and sometimes, like the other night, there’s an unexpected celebrant whose presence spoke to me so strongly of the effects of Christ that I still haven’t forgotten. And now I’m somewhat dissatisfied. There is SO MUCH of God – and He is bold and bright and full of colors I can see but have never seen, and He aligns the shards of our lives with adoration and precision and surprises for us to find later. And I have to choose Him over and over. Can my foolish heart never settle on its Maker and stay? What could be more fascinating or illuminating or delicious or consuming or exciting? And, anyway, where else do I have to go? Truly, what else do I have to do? Let’s be honest. Let me be, for once, truly and brutally and unforgettably honest.

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Is this real life?

I took the LSAT this morning. Then, I got home and crashed into bed like I’d been hit by a tractor trailer, determined to sleep as though I’d just been through some terrible and trying ordeal. And then I couldn’t sleep. I hurt. I felt sad. I’m attributing it to my dad leaving (who’d come down to take me to the test and back and whom I hadn’t seen in far too long and lost far to soon), and perhaps also to the temporary loss of my cell phone, which he accidentally took with him. Four hours away. On a Saturday night. No good.

But that didn’t even really matter after about 6:30pm because – and here’s where I get back to the point – I miss the LSAT. Okay, you’re right … that’s ridiculous. But I miss the way I felt before I took this monumental and unnecessarily traumatizing exam. Because before I took it, it hadn’t happened yet. Circular, I know. Point being, now I seriously am on my way to the next and yet-to-be determined chapter of my life. I’ve taken this exam and the score will be my ticket into law school.

So (follow my twisted logic if you can) I’ve taken the exam and I’m now eligible to apply. And because I can means I really should, in order to better my odds of acceptance. And why would I want to better my odds? Because I want to go to law school, of course. Because I want to graduate, leave my darling, gorgeous friends with their great, big hearts and hearty, humble souls and  their kind, thoughtful minds, strike out by myself, far from home and this place which has built me, on a three-year course of arduous intellectual labor surrounded by raving liberals. Yes.

Lord in Heaven, I’m simply grateful that, today, You’re not issuing a dramatic call to action, or presenting me with to an immense glamorous task. Today, You just need me to follow You. During these strange little hours, You just want me to sit and wait on You.  Help me remember that.

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Where?

The reason that I started this blog was because I felt displaced at a time when place had suddenly become both fascinating and frighteningly important to me. Eight months in the city were measured carefully out in five, eight-hour workdays that consumed what I carried to them and left my insides smudged with strange ideas and realizations. Soon I couldn’t see through them, needed a place to spread them out and see what they’d done to me. That’s how this started. And when I wasn’t blogging, I was journaling and planner-ing and talking and reading and praying. Those eight months are nearly completely contained in text, both here and in three diaries on my bookshelf. All in words – in things I could look at, which I really needed since I couldn’t see my place through all of the crowds and traffic and buildings.

But now I’m home – and I am part of this place and it is part of me in so many bright and obvious ways. I can see it, and it can see me more clearly than most anyone. Well, there are a few exceptions to that. (But only really a very few.) Everything that Hillsdale is and was made to be has to do with recognizing me as who I am – as a human being, a young woman, a Christian, a conservative, a student, a teacher, an artist, an author, a sister, a mom (metaphorically!), a daughter, and, most of all, an awed, scared girl on the cusp of a new, bright, messy, endless life.

So leaving words here doesn’t make sense the way it did when I was apart from this place. I created this site for myself, a clean electric space that no one could touch in the midst of the polluted confusion that left me so discouraged and determined, but it is small and simple, like a mirror. It reflects what I see with the distortions I give it. It’s my bias exposed. It’s one of my secrets. I guess that’s enough reason to keep it up while I’m here, while I’m learning and growing and flourishing again.

Speaking of learning, I’m going to write my thesis about sense of place and the idea of the university – I want to make a case for place as community, as understood by Wendell Barry. Have you read Hannah Coulter? Go read it, please. It’ll help you understand what you read here. All of you silent, beautiful, wonderful, invisible people who come here and read what I write and leave again.

I’m not going to apologize that this is about to change and the things that may have drawn you here at the beginning may no longer appear in my writing. I don’t have the same sadness that prompts me to take ugly things and pain them into beautiful words the way I needed to initially. But I hope that other things happen here. Bear with me.

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Okay Okay Okay

Life on fast forward goes like this: sunshine shower yellow make-up quick ponytail saw-my-shoes-where’d-they-go breakfast breathe breathe breathe. …I love being around Gwen… Run to bio (missed that last slide!) out the door and oh, there’s Emily! … “Girl – look what I made you.”… Sunshine steep hill *wish for coffee* class nocellphone cold air; dash home/grab books/dash back/study. …Read… 15-MINUTES lunch yum salad yum; Quick coffee cold leaves class class class …Dr. Arnn on Churchill? That’s how you know you’re alive… Dash home/grab shoes/3-mile loop/quick dinner/quicker shower/grab books/settle down/studystudystudy; …Scripture with Casey … Sleep and sweet dreams I can’t remember later…

Can I just show you my planner from yesterday? Goes like this:

7:15 Breakfast with Gwen;

 8:00 Class;

9:00 Class;

10:00 Edit personal statement;

11:30 Lunch;

12:00 Class;

1:00 Class;

 2:00 Work;

 4:00 Professor Meeting;

4:30 Run;

5:30 Dinner;

6:30 Study;

7:30 Tower Player’s Production of Company;

10:00 Read, pray, sleep.

LSAT ON SATURDAY!!! Wish me luck.

PS

My senior thesis is about Spiritual Geography!! So is my Churchill paper!! More later …

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Christmas Clouds

I stand quietly in the window – close enough to the glass that the gray chill from outside grips my skin, and close enough to the kitchen that the warm sound of culinary chaos rolls around my shoulders like a bright comfort of fleece. Firelight flickers at my ankles while rain shivers through the whips of wind snapping down the street. I’m protected by a few centimeters’ worth of glass and a hundred million miles of warm yellow Catholic sister love laughing over the stove. The doorbell rings. “I’ll get it!” I shout, as I would if I were at home. The way I do when I’m home.

Today, a bunch of Catholic girls on campus got together and made dinner, and all of the Catholic boys were invited. It was a rainy day – a “sinking” day, as my roommate calls it, but I floated through today when I thought I might sink. It was an exquisite knot of challenges, surprises, laughter, blessings, music and (happy) tears … and yesterday was full of sunshine and photography. I don’t understand how I deserve such brilliantly overflowing days.
Tomorrow I take Sarah and Nick’s engagement photos. I’m possibly more excited than they are.

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