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.   🙂

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Around A Square

What started as a contest has suddenly morphed into a rich moment of affection and edification, and my eyes close as my heart opens. Something unfolds from the inside and blossoms under my skin, soaking up the sweetness of careful affirmation, all the more welcome because it had gone un-missed for so long. The tight lines that locked our eyes and edged our interaction are knocked aside by the thoughtful kindesses that bubble out of us, brimming. It’s sharing and confessing and rebelling and embracing and laughing at once, and the echoes leave pretty prints on the insides of my eyes.

I was eating dinner the other night with a few awesome people, when something happened that bugged me. Somebody sassed somebody else, then followed it up with a quick, apologetic “but I love ya.” The sentiment was sincere, but was not properly communicated by the words he used to convey it. He did not mean Love.

A language major really helps me understand the different ways that people tie concepts to sounds. The problem with these ties, though, is that they require that everyone agree on exactly what concept is bound to which word. And humans, as we all know, are contrary creatures that have a history of simply flouting the agreements that hinder them. Love, in the case of contemporary American English, verbalized way too often. That is, spoken to too many people in too many different situations, and thus weakened, and is also too often used in its verb form. Rather than to tell someone that we have Love for them, we toss around “love” to talk about objects we want and trends we like. Something is only merely mediocre when we “don’t love it.”

[Tangent: This, econ friends, is part of the reason why I just can’t get down with that whole anarchy thing. We can’t even reach “willing solidarity” in the matter of grammar – in fact, I’m firmly of the mind that it is precisely the “free, voluntary, direct” use of the English language that has been at the root of today’s moral and ethical train wreck. So I’m skeptical about the propensity of 300 million rational, self-interested agents to achieve anything resembling a society, let alone a harmonious one. (I’m open to discussion on this one … I need more opportunities to thrash out my ideas.]

This concept got driven home again at Unite last night.  I don’t often feel the impulse to attend, being Catholic, but I went along with a friend and had a great time – especially because the speaker talked about Love and Justice … and emphasized Love. God is Love, he told us, and everything else is an attribute. Love defines God, and just describes Him. And Christianity is the only religion in the world that centers on Love; remove Love, he told us, and you’ve done away with Christianity.What a way to redefine a word. I want to challenge you the same way I plan to challenge myself: next time you say the word “love,” think of God. Think of True Love, of its source and its definition. Mean it.

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Default Daydream

A tired train sighs discontentedly somewhere out in the night as I gulp down grateful breaths of ice air and dream about my cherry orchard – the one I imagine myself buying, somewhere up in Northern Michigan. Memories of Grand Marais sweep through my mind like dune sands thrown by Lake Superior winds as I walk and imagine the tiny house and its big front porch. I plant a mental garden and watch its hot fragrances blossom into dreams of nature and nurture in this place I hope to find.  It’s an adventure and a homecoming, all wrapped into one.

My ideas about place have been worried by my exposure to two new stories – The Blind Side and Eat, Pray, Love – movies I watched over Thanksgiving weekend. Both of these films featured strong women played by actresses I love, and left me with a lot of food for thought. The Blind Side, actually, has more to do with my own personal and spiritual development, so I’ll just focus on the other.

Eat, Pray, Love was so bad for me. I basically just wanted to drop everything and run to the airport. A year traveling Italy, India and Bali? How exciting and inspiring and exotic. Though I probably would have spent my time doing different things than the protagonist did, I still found myself thirsting for the experience – for the sense of the place. So I felt really torn when I stood up after the movie concluded on the idea that family is the most important thing and returned to the Wendell Berry book I’d put down just before the movie started. The pages in my hand felt vanilla. His descriptions of a tiny family farm, bland. The predictable lines of apathetic print simply couldn’t compare with the bright visual feast I’d watched Julia Roberts’ character consume with such appetite.

Still, our new pastor’s warning stuck with me: “Great deeds come at great costs.” And the things this woman had given up in order to travel were pretty significant. Family, as she learned and I already knew, is ultimately the most important thing. And I love, love, LOVE my state. Michigan is home and always will be. Still, I crave colors and crowds and bright foreign landscapes even as I question my motives for doing so. These things, after all, were precisely those that drove me out of DC. So perhaps I need to learn to be happy where I am, with what I am doing – to breathe color of my and God’s own making into them, rather than import it. After all, so many beautiful people have led devastatingly meaningful lives without ever traveling more than 50 miles from home. I must try to emulate their modesty.

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Home Place

Cozy in my mother’s blanket, I tuck into a chair with Wendell Berry’s essays burning in my hands. The brilliance of the light blaring through the window distracts me from the dull ache of anticipation, but only for a moment. Warm under the memory of hot color dropping through the stained glass and across my face during Mass this morning, I turn thirstily to this poet’s gorgeous prose.

This is what the inside of his head must look like.

I wish I could describe my place with as much precision as does Berry. He draws the goodness out and makes it presentable, somehow without leaving sentimental fingerprints all over it.

He also reminds me to surround myself in simplicity, to slow down, to confront myself every now and again.

It’s a good thing Thanksgiving break is here. I need to retreat, to immerse myself in those concentric circles where I began, to nourish my mind with Northern Michigan and my body with good, clean cold and Mom’s cooking.

Time to re-read Walden.

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Soy Yo

There’s a place in a house near some trees way Up North that makes a good starting point. It’s a good place to start when you come looking for me, I mean. It’s  like your best adventure – no clarity, only clues that draw you on and on. A shiny, gorgeous treasure map glued down under our feet, spread quite thin in a layer of durable linoleum. Plain, serviceable, mysterious. Memorable. Layers of love have settled into it, compacted tight by a dozen dozen holidays’ downward pressure. It’s where we keep our habits. We set them down and walk on them, forcing them down level where they support us all the day long. Old prayers and whisps of past head-butting gather lightly in corners until the day they’re lighted up, searched out and swept away. Days when this happens are good days. They tend to be the days that come just before really good days. There’s a long crack near the fridge that flows like the continuity of culture and memory – a steady stream of awesome flowing down from generations spent in one space. A few tiny dents mark the first steps of my first high heels. A whole story spreads literally at your feet. Look up, around, and in my eyes – then look down.

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