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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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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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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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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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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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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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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