Life

March is here, and my camera and I see the world returning to life in small and miraculous ways. 

In little leaves whose pale flush of chlorophyll hasn't fully waxed to green...

...buds so fresh out of the branch that they're still sticky...

 ...delicate lily flowers like drooping bells, blooming from sleeping underground bulbs...

...tiny rose leaves still backed with soft, silvery hairs... 

...plum trees blushing into plumes of cotton candy, with thousands of fingernail-sized pink blossoms opening at the same time...

See! The winter is past; 

the rains are over and gone.

Flowers appear on the earth; 

the season of singing has come.

Long Spoons Living

I once received an e-mail forward telling the story of a fictional tourist who wandered through heaven and hell. I typically don't much care for forwarded e-mails, often finding them shallow and sappy. This one might be both, but for some reason it stuck with me and came around to mean something deeper.

So the story goes, our tourist arrives in hell and is surprised to see a large table around which is seated a group of people. A  large pot in the middle of the table contains plenty of food for all of them. But the only utensils the people have are spoons, as long as yardsticks, strapped to their arms. As the diners try to bring food back to their mouths, it slips off their long, clumsy utensils, leaving the people starving and emaciated.

Image courtesy of stock.xchng and salsachica

To the tourist's further surprise, heaven contains almost the same scenario: table, pot of stew, long spoons. But the people there are well-fed and happy, laughing and talking as they share the meal. Why? Because they are using their long spoons to feed each other, reaching across the table to supply one another's needs, and in turn having other people meet theirs.

Giving is a two-way street. Growing up in a community-oriented family environment, I guess I never really questioned having my needs met by them or my responsibility to contribute to the family. The needs at stake weren't only food, shelter, and clothing, but also love, community, and affirmation. When I went to college, I took this mentality with me: your roommates, friends, classmates, even professors, are human beings who deserve your respect and need your care. It works excellently when people in community with each other share this perspective.

Image courtesy of stock.xchng and alexkalina

However, not all people do. In college especially, I met some people who were intent on using their spoons to feed only themselves, no matter how clumsy and inefficient the effort. Many were single, reasonably affluent, living on their own for the first time, and absorbed in their own education experiences. Their resources of time, money, energy, were completely consumed by activities they found fun, their own personal goals, or relationships that got them ahead. There was nothing left over to give to others. I, too, tried feeding only myself with my spoon for a while, and it left me feeling tough, yes, self-sufficient, yes, but still gnawingly hungry.

Image courtesy of stock.xchng and mzacha

But constantly feeding other people with your spoon while they continue to feed only themselves is a recipe for straight-up starvation. Long-term, one-sided sacrifice and service lead to burnout and loneliness. Giving to your community is a good thing. In fact, in the short term, sometimes the best and most needed giving is to people who can't give back. But if you're constantly feeding others and no one reaches out to feed you back, you'll end up malnourished, not to mention exhausted and probably disillusioned.

Image courtesy of stock.xchng and LoganCale

Successful, mutual relationships are about people using their long spoons to feed each other--parents and children, husbands and wives, church communities, friends. When you look at your resources and, instead of using them all up on yourself, sacrifice some for someone else, you risk not having enough. But the most satisfying feeling in the world is when the math doesn't add up. You give away something you want or need (affection, time, money, energy, etc.). But instead of being left hungry, someone else comes in and provides for your deficit, making up the difference.

Image courtesy of stock.xchng and juliaf

It's called love, I think. It's looking at this enormous, awkward spoon you've been given to eat with and, instead of seeing it as an ill-formed impediment because the goal is feeding yourself, seeing it as the perfect tool because the point is to feed someone else.

Lament

Two weeks ago, I did something terrifying.

I read poetry in front of people.

Scary poetry. Honest poetry. Lament poetry.

Lament is one of my new favorite words. Merriam-Webster (almost the best dictionary ever, after the OED), defines it as an intransitive verb, meaning to mourn aloud. 

Free image courtesy of stock.xchng and OmirOnia

Mourn. Aloud.

I love my church. It's my family. But over the last year especially, I've been realizing that the larger church--or at least many people in it--has little space in its theology for the bad things that happen. I'm not talking about little struggles, bumps in the road. Those are a natural part of every human's life. I'm talking about the bad things--the things for which there is no sense. Eight-year-old girls who get leukemia. Forty-five-year-old fathers who die of cancer. Classes of kindergarteners shot down by sick, deranged gunmen.

Volumes and volumes of Christian theology are devoted to understanding these things. Logical treatises, high-caliber philosophical explanations are offered. Yes, in moments of quiet, those explanations can help us understand a world that shakes us to the core. Yes, there is a place for understanding. But it's not in the middle of the suffering.

It's natural to want to skip past the pain to the victory; to tell thesis-driven, neatly packaged stories of conflict, climax, and resolution. We minimize the dark, torn-up moments of life because we don't know what to do with them--instead we fast-forward straight to the overcoming, the lesson learned, the transformation accomplished. All those are good things to see and give thanks for, in 20/20 hindsight. But sometimes, when you're in the midst of the story, you have no idea what the resolution's going to look like. And when your feet are bloody from the road, you may not even be sure you'll ever reach the destination.

Free image courtesy of stock.xchng and jagoelaar

Free image courtesy of stock.xchng and jagoelaar

My pastor has started a sermon series on laments in the Bible, and it brings me joy because it means our church is talking about these things. The most helpful thing, when all the walls of your world are caving in and you have no pain tolerance left, is to mourn. To acknowledge the pain. The frustration. The fear. The confusion. The anger. The abandonment. These are real feelings. If you haven't bled on the sharp point of these feelings yourself, others' cries of lament may sound grotesque, depressing, even melodramatic. But listen anyway. Mourning sucks the venom from the snakebite. It keeps the sorrow from drowning you when you can't yet see the shore. And to listen to someone else's mourning, to be a safe sound room where their raw pain can be released, is to help them heal.

Free image courtesy of stock.xchng and anyone71

So here are a few laments. Though my lament two weeks ago was in poem form because I love the power of poetry to express raw emotion, laments can also be expressed through songs, stories, paintings, articles, novels, and maybe even forms I haven't discovered yet.

Here's one of my favorite laments, a poem called Bereft by Robert Frost: 

Where had I heard this wind before

Change like this to a deeper roar?

What would it take my standing there for,

Holding open a restive door,

Looking down hill to a frothy shore?

Summer was past and day was past.

Sombre clouds in the west were massed.

Out in the porch’s sagging floor,

Leaves got up in a coil and hissed,

Blindly struck at my knee and missed.

Something sinister in the tone

Told me my secret must be known:

Word I was in the house alone

Somehow must have gotten abroad,

Word I was in my life alone,

Word I had no one left but God.

And a piece of a lament from Psalm 13 (The Message):

Long enough, God—
    you’ve ignored me long enough.
I’ve looked at the back of your head
    long enough. Long enough
I’ve carried this ton of trouble,
    lived with a stomach full of pain.

And one from me: 

I am not a poet

I am just a

kid broken by the thunder of

gunfire

brimming with words that

have noplace else

to go.

Though laments are scary to share in all their raw honesty, the sharing is worth it if it frees even one other person to mourn aloud. Or maybe if it teaches someone how to listen. 

Have you ever tried writing a lament? Tried sharing it with others? 

Popcorn

Ever popped popcorn in a hot air popper? It's pretty fun. In fact, I maybe do it more for the entertainment than for the popcorn.

You have to position the implements carefully, though, or you can end up with a popcorn explosion on your hands. You start with so little--just a handful of hard kernels--that if you hadn't seen it happen before, you'd never expect what happens to them. 

They whirl around in the popper, getting blasted with hot air and doing mostly nothing for a long time. Then--just when you're about to lose interest and determine that you've got a dud batch of kernels on your hands--something happens.

One at a time, a few kernels start to inflate like parachutes, turning from hard pellets to fluffy, cloud-like pillows. 

 

Then a few rapidly turns into a lot...

...until your popper is so full that it looks like it's going to explode. If that bowl in the picture weren't squeezed right under the chute, there would be popcorn all over the kitchen floor. (Sometimes a few rogue kernels still get away.) 

I look back at my posts of the last few months, and I kind of see my life going through the popcorn popper, too. A few months ago--a very few--I was writing empty posts, hard posts: how to speak to the suffering, grieving through song lyrics, the confusion of being a twentysomething. But my life today is so full that it threatens to overflow all over the floor. While I still ask unanswered questions and find a constant need for direction, I am also brimming over with gratitude. In just a few months, I've gone from a career stalemate, consuming loneliness, and paralysis about future decisions, to career doors opening, an assembly of breathtakingly wonderful people in my life, and hope for the future ahead. Weeping may last through the night, but joy comes with the morning (Psalm 30:5). 

Joy that overflows like popcorn.


What are you thankful for in your life today? How have you seen fullness grow out of emptiness? 

The Spark

In a season of leafless trees and wet skies, here's a change of pace on this blog: some winter poetry.

Free image courtesy of stock.xchng and Kadha

The Spark

Raindrops like

flowers of glass

clinging to twig latticework

A net of liquid pearls

against the opaque sky.

Unchained

slipping down like

unguarded

strings and strands of diamonds.

One lets go,

falling freely

spinning into space—

—a spark—

concentrating the

dull grey morning un-dark

to a single, fiery

flash—

an upside-down

world-mirror

that catches a glimpse of

hope—

breathing,

reflecting,

transforming,

reimagining the world in

one glass raindrop,

a vision in freefall.

Small Magic

I spent last weekend away at a magical cottage.

My family and I took some much-needed escape time over MLK weekend and tried our luck on an unknown B&B. Nestled in the big trees of the Santa Cruz Mountains, Redwood Croft is far enough away from civilization to be conveniently detached from cell phone and internet service. The owner informed us that a "croft" was a medieval word for a house, like this wood-and-stone manor, with adjoining land for a garden. (Garden might not be exactly the right word for the wild and lovely ramble of native plants that wound around the house.) The grounds begged me to tramp around with my camera. 

How do I know it was magical, you ask? Well, it was obvious, my dear Chronicles of Narnia fans. There was a lamp-post in the front yard. As if we'd come from the far country of Spare Oom.  

Actually, I knew it as soon as we turned on to the street. It was called Ice Cream Grade. 

Not to mention that there was a wishing well in the back. Pre-equipped with wishes.  

 Maybe not your typical storybook variety of magic, but certainly one that returned me to childhood: the giant trampoline under the redwoods. I hadn't jumped on a trampoline in years. I quickly rediscovered just how euphoric flying can be.  

Unfortunately, I don't have a picture of some of my favorite memories, such as sitting down to the sumptuous breakfasts served on vintage dishes, with taper candles and white poinsettias on the table (there are a few photos on the B&B's website). Or curling up to read by the warm woodstove in the evenings, a strand of Christmas lights twinkling just outside the window, a little old dog named Spinner snoring on a sheepskin on the couch. 

But with views like this to photograph, I didn't have many pictures left on my camera card anyway. 

Magic is everywhere, usually in the small things, if you're looking for it. Maybe it was just a little easier to see at Redwood Croft.

Did you have any adventures over the long weekend? Discover any small magic of your own? 

Turning the Page

Well, good morning, 2013. I've been underground for a while. Nice to see you.

Time to get a new year of blogging up and running with a post about New Year's Resolutions. Someone told me recently that they don't bother with resolutions at New Year's--if they see a need for change in their life, they'll get on with changing it immediately. I respect that, and I don't hold much stock in resolutions either, but last year I talked a bit about my philosophy about resolutions vs. goals. I do like the opportunity afforded by a new year to turn a page in life. If 2012 beat down your idealism and best efforts and dragged you through the mud, it's okay. Wipe the slate clean. Cancel the debts. Start fresh. Tomorrow is another day.

I like to start by glancing over my shoulder at last year's goals. It's a bit encouraging, a bit dismal, and a bit amusing to remind myself of what I set out to do in the last year:

1. Get to know God better by reading the Bible through in chronological order

Status: in process (forever). I made it about halfway through the Bible before this year's hurricanes got in the way. I'm hoping to pick up the other half and finish it this year.

2. Have the second draft of my novel completed and be ready to start looking at literary agents by June

Status: in process (hopefully not forever). The second (and third) drafts of my novel are done (yay!) but I've learned a lot about the process of publishing since last January. I decided to recruit a squad of test readers, primarily 9-14-year-olds, to read the manuscript and help me identify its weak spots. That process is now winding up, as the last few of these loyal secret agents send me their invaluable files of comments. Armed with these, I plan to troubleshoot the manuscript one last time and then apply to some literary agents. I've also learned more about the increasingly attractive and accessible process of self-publishing, which may be another possible route for my book.

3. Take a 2-month class on blogging and social media for authors

Status: done! One down! I learned so much from this class, taught by Kristin Lamb. We may not agree on every issue, but it definitely got me thinking about writing as a business, kicked me into gear on Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, and Google+ (yipes!), and most importantly, got me connected with a network of other writers who are working toward the same goals.

4. Buy a car

Status: also done! My sweet silver ride still makes me smile. Ever since we met back in July, it's been love for Baby and me :) Incidentally, I've also learned how to check PSI, buy a pair of windshield wipers, and refill wiper fluid in the engine (hint: you can use plain water :)).

5. Read Gone with the Wind, Othello, and The Kite Runner

Status: 2 out of 3. None of these are especially happy books, but The Kite Runner was just too intense for me by the time I thought about it in mid-August. Othello--forgive me, Shakespeare--was not my favorite play ever. The conflict felt contrived and the female lead was just downright wimpy. Othello wasn't exactly a genius, either. I think the best role went to Iago's wife, who told everybody what was what (before dying in the last scene, of course). Gone with the Wind was the best of the bunch--a soaring, operatic panorama in a style that reminded me of Les Miserables, but was much easier to read. The characters are fiery and unforgettable, and the portrait of the antebellum South was detailed and dramatic. A great book, if you've got time for a long one.

And now for some new goals. We'll see how these fare in the year to come :)

1. Grow closer to God

2. See my novel accepted for publication or self-published

3. Work up to a monthly income I can live on

4. Learn the craft of bookbinding. Okay. How cool would THAT be??

What are your goals for 2013?