This Steady Scenery

I bought a whitewater kayak this past week.
An old one, which in kayaking terms, is 7 years.
How appropriate. 7 years ago is when I was told I wasn't “allowed” to paddle anymore.
I had just finished college and was packing to move to New Hampshire, to work in my friends' kayaking shop on Lake Winnipesaukee. I was to teach flatwater and whitewater paddling for the summer, and possibly extend the work into a permanent position. I'd had back problems for about two years at that point, and finally went to a doctor to get it checked out.
He told me he feared that the problems were structural and that paddling could prolong or even worsen the issues. He told me I shouldn't paddle anymore.
There went my future, my plans and part of my identity.
Since then I've only paddled a handful of times; I haven't attempted to roll a kayak and have stuck to mostly easy runs. Life kept moving while that love in me was left in that moment, as if an anchor had been set while the ship above kept trying to sail. Later I found out that paddling wouldn't cause any more structural damage, rather it would cause blinding, debilitating pain.

I've recently begun a rather aggressive chiropractic treatment for my back. It is a process; some days the pain is dramatically less, others it is just as bad as it has been. What gives me hope is that there are changes; that the pain isn't the maddening hum of years past. There are changes in the steady scenery of pain. Maybe this time I will get better.
But then again, maybe the pain stays.
I bought a boat because I don't care anymore.
If I am in pain, then I will stick to the small kayaking runs.
If I am in pain, I won't paddle much.
But I've let pain keep me from something that brings me life for far too long, and in this, the year of sweetness, I'm willing to try anything. I want to lift that anchor, bring it with me. No matter how little, how infrequent or how minor my paddling ends up being, I'm willing to try. I'm smart enough to know I should.

(Older posts about this: Here, Here, Here, Here)

Perpetual Spring

For my friend Leslie’s 32nd birthday a few weeks ago she had a few of us join her in a desperate housewives takeover of a local tattoo parlor. She was getting her nose pierced, others were actually getting tattoos.
I don’t have any tattoos; I went to get one back in 2001 and thankfully the shop was closed or I may have gotten something I later regretted. However this recent trip planted the idea in my head of getting some ink. My reasoning goes back to my previous post: “Sweetness Follows”: I know that this season in my life is so beautiful and delicious but also extremely fleeting and wholly temporary. It will end, and end sooner than I’d hope. I see these little seasons passing and some I handle better than others.
Some end because of distance. Some end because the changes that happen are too great to overcome. Some end because expectations diverge. Some end because hearts can’t agree. Some end because of death.
Whatever the reason, the feeling is the same. There is a sense of loss right now but I am reminded of two plants in this instance: the American chestnut and the resurrection fern.
When the chestnut succumbs to the blight, the stem/trunk is killed off, but the roots remain. Those roots will continue to send up new stalks of growth with the constant hope that a few will survive. Often you’ll observe a large, dead stump, sometimes 75 years gone, with dozens of tiny chestnut shoots surrounding it. The roots don’t know when to give up and as long as they stay firmly planted, those new growths will continue.
The resurrection fern shrivels up and appears dead when resources wane and droughts appear, but at the first sign of rain it unfurls in a fit of lush green optimism. It is as if it lives in this perpetual spring of new beginnings. It is proof that life, promises and blessings are new every morning if we choose to let them be.

Singing in the Storm

"Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It's like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can't stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship."
— Anne Lamott

I wanted to say thanks to all those who have said to me that they understand what I meant in that last post. There have been several of you, and your willingness to sing in that boat with me has meant much.

Like a Miracle

A miracle:
“an effect or extraordinary event in the physical world that surpasses all known human or natural powers and is ascribed to a supernatural cause.”

There is much that looks impossible. Whether those impossibilities are longstanding or recent, they contain the stuff of futility. I look at them and I know I am powerless. And so I do the only thing I can do: I pray. Prayer, to whoever it is, is hope projected.

I pray for miracles and when I do, part of me expects a big event, my very own parting of the sea. I expect noise and action, an epiphany or a grand gesture, a watershed moment where nothing before looks like what is after.
I’m beginning to learn that miracles are miraculous not because of their size but because of their specificity. They aren’t these big events; they are, like my understanding of who God is, quiet. Miracles, when they do come, are more of a breath than a shout.

That isn’t to say they aren’t life-altering, merely that they are only recognizable to those who were looking for them. In that way, they are much like love.

A Place On Earth

In my AP English class we had a project where we had to make a representation of either heaven or hell and present it in front of the class. I chose to do hell, because I could understand that. I can comprehend the idea of hell. I can fathom loneliness, chronic uncomfortably; I imagine hell to be a place that isn’t fire and brimstone but oppressive silence, an uncomfortable chill and very damp. In my mind, it is a slow ceaseless sort of torture.
It’s heaven I don’t get.
When I think of heaven, my mental picture is wooden picnic tables on clouds. It’s rather boring. But if I replace the word heaven with the word paradise, I have a completely different reaction. I can imagine a paradise. I think.
Several years ago I wrote a short story about people talking about their ideas of heaven. I think I did this because I don’t know my own. As I was writing the story, I found it fascinating that each character’s version of heaven was totally different than the others; that what is heaven to one person might be closer to purgatory to another.
I guess what gets me about heaven: to be what it is supposed to be, it must be all things to all people. I can’t wrap my head around that.
To be honest, I don’t know if I believe in heaven. I don’t live with some confidant expectation that I’ll end up there; that the people I love will be there too. Don’t get me wrong; I want it to exist but I wouldn’t be in the least bit surprised if this life is it and strangely that notion doesn’t do much to change my faith. But at this moment, I have to believe in heaven. There seems too much to a soul to simply disappear.

Jump Back, 1999

I just read that it was ten years ago that JFK, Jr died.

I remember that summer with clarity I don’t have for any previous seasons (or really any since). When I read that it had been a decade that summer flooded back in full-color flashes.

It was 1999. I was leaving for Syracuse in a few weeks. I’d lived with my father for exactly one year and was still getting used to freedom. I was saying my goodbyes to friends I’d known my whole life, shedding my family and the person I was sick of being. It was a typical Virginia summer of suffocating humidity and days of nonstop 90 degree sun. I was working at the environmental consulting firm as an intern and I dressed up every day and made ridiculous amounts of money. I shared an office with a guy who looked a lot like Charlie from "The West Wing". One of my best friends from high school worked in the office with me. I drove us to work everyday in the little blue Mitsubishi that I borrowed from my grandparents while they were summering in Maine. We took long lunch breaks and loved the feeling of pretending to be a grown up and having the money to back it up. Every morning we stressed about what we'd do that night.

It was the same summer that Blair Witch Project came out and I distinctly remember reading an article in the Washington Post about how it was allegedly based on actual footage. Burkettsville is less than a half-hour from my house. I saw that movie during a rainstorm. Seth and I drove back home in his pale yellow Mercedes and we were frightened of the endless forests and gravel roads of our home town. Ghosts and witches could be anywhere.

It was the summer of Woodstock ’99 and the chaos there. I remember friends considering going but never getting around to it. It was year of the final Lilith Fair; I went with friends from work.

I remember the overwhelming sense of sadness at the loss of JFK, Jr and I didn’t even know much about him. I was saddest for the Bassett family. It was just so abrupt.

Ten years. It went by at a speed I am just beginning to process.

Chestnut-ing

I'm on a business trip but spent the afternoon riding on a farm cart covered in hay bales, looking at squiggly chestnut shoots. These are the future of the American chestnut. Some have died, some are weakened by cankers, some shoot up toward the sky.
In the fall, the chestnut trees drop thousands of spiny pods, each containing three seeds. They feel like an urchin and at the farm they litter the ground.

Some are from the trees that are now the parents to the blight-resistant strain currently in testing.

In that little spiny urchin could be history changed. I picked up a chestnut seed and put it in my pocket. It'll remind me what hope can look like, no matter the odds.

Calm Before The Storm (o' Change)

I'm sitting on the hours before our country swears in the President we have ordained as the next Lincoln and all I can think about is how I won't have a date for Valentines Day.

Politics are personal, I guess.

In some ways I don't want to see his presidency in actuality. I like the simple idea of hope, rather than the gritty and much less unglamorous world of the day-to-day policy. I'm afraid to get bogged down in the 24-hour news cycle and the politics of Washington and realize he is just like every other politician. I like his speeches; they stay like cologne long after their physical presence has passed. He is an orator of beauty, a man who wears simple and sparse like he invented it, a consummate gentleman who loves his wife and children and isn't shy about being the smartest man in the room. And I eat it up. He could feed me mashed potatoes with a slingshot and if he kept talkin' pretty I'd sit in the corner and take it.
What a relief from the past 8 years of jockdom, bravado, truthiness and preconceived decisions. I almost don't quite know how to respond to a Congress, Senate and President all representing (more or less) my basic civic beliefs. It hasn't been this way since before I was legally allowed to vote.

I want Obama to succeed. Badly I want him to succeed. I want the sacred names of American History to contain him. I want WashingtonJeffersonLincolnRooseveltKennedyObama to be a sentence every American school child knows. I want him to appear on the money my nieces and nephews will carry, replacing that bastard Andrew Jackson on the $20, the new face of hope smiling at you every time you withdrawal from an ATM.

But.

Oh But.

I'm steeling myself against this hope, because Gulf of Tonkin and Watergate and Iran Contra and Lewinsky and Haliburton and Blackwater tell me to do so. Because even the Emancipation Proclamation had ulterior motives than just freeing slaves (read: keeping France out of its support of its industrial partner in the South and drumming up support in the North from seriously pissed voters wondering why their kids were coming home in boxes. It essentially made Slavery the issue). Because we have a government that uses the phrase “collateral damage”. Because loving the current America requires a certain level of forgetting America, like agreeing to date a boyfriend that has time and again let you down.

I want to believe that Obama will change the Presidency but I can't help worrying that the Presidency will change Obama.

Daffodils

January lied to the daffodils.

They are the embodiment of hope springing eternal; those fresh green shoots bursting through the frosted terra firma of endless winter.

And January has lied to them.
Daffodils think their time has come, they think this week is March and that it is safe to emerge and announce the return of life.

But they are wrong.
Because between now and the relative safety of March lies the tempest of February.
They will freeze.
It is only a matter of time.
January has lied to all of us.
And January doesn’t care.

"Set the foot down with distrust on the crust of the world--it is thin." -Edna

For the Better

I remember sitting on the floor in the office of Environmental Studies my junior year of college, watching the planes hit and re-hit the towers and thinking, "Nothing will ever be the same after this. This is history at its worst."
Last night I sat on a couch in my friend's living room, wearing blue Mardi Gras beads, drinking some strange concoction out of an orange bendy straw, watching CNN's headline "BARACK OBAMA ELECTED PRESIDENT" pop up on the screen and thinking, "Nothing will ever be the same after this. This is our country's history at its best."
We toasted with cheap champagne in white Dixie Cups.We screamed, we clapped, we hugged, we stared. We got emotional.
We literally danced in the street.
As the senate and house results came in, one young guy said almost to himself, "Democrats in the White House!? And Congress!? I might have health insurance in two years!!!" The very first thing he thought of when confronted with such a change was his health. That was and is his biggest fear: to be hurt and not get care, to have something small happen that would bankrupt him for life. How telling. Politics has an intimacy we gloss over.

Just as I did on 9/12, I woke up today not knowing what the day would look like, only that yesterday I witnessed a watershed moment in our nation's history and that from here on out the rules have changed.
This time, for the better.

Declarations of Desire

It's the Puritans' fault we have a set election day.
Blame them for the 20+ months of campaigning and advertisements, the robocalls, the countless countdowns, the feeling of Election Day being a sort of New Years Day for the civic minded.
Thank you, Puritans.
I live in a state that sponsors early voting and many of my friends have gone out and done so. Good for them, any vote at any time is worthwhile!
I consciously chose to vote today because I believe so strongly in the day itself, the feeling of waiting in line for such a purpose; standing in a queue with fellow citizens all keen to exercise their right to do so. I walked into my polling place with no one in front of me; I got there in a lull and took my ballot to my booth and filled in the little circles that I prayed would mean something. I placed my sticker over my heart and walked out into the fall.

I remember the first time I consciously went into the voting booth with my mother. It was the 1988 election and she was one of the last to vote in the tiny fire station five miles from our house. I remember looking up at the levers, my mom explaining what they do and why we do it. I got chills watching her pull that handle to seal her votes and open our curtain to the rest of the world. She did something important.

We women have only had the right to vote for 88 years. That means we weren't allowed to vote for Teddy Roosevelt or Taft or Wilson; we voted after they had come and gone. In North Carolina the 19th amendment was only officially ratified by the state in 1971. We aren't a state that thought it was a good idea to give women the vote 88 years ago. I am blessed to have that privilege now.

Sarah Vowell, whom I'm currently obsessed with quoting, has a lovely statement in her essay, "Dear Dead Congressmen" talking about suffrage.

"...look up the word suffrage in the dictionary. In mine, after noting the main meanings--the privilege of voting, the "exercise of such a right," the third interpretation of suffrage is this: "A short intercessory prayer." Isn't that beautiful? And true? For what is voting if not a kind of prayer,, and what are prayers if not declarations of hope and desire?"

God's World

It's the end of the summer, that time when football season fires up, new habits are promised and seem possible and I develop an insatiable desire to buy school supplies. I can't help it, I really do love the smell of Staples and Office Depot. It smells organized.

This summer flew. I don't know if it flew by necessarily, but it flew...flew into messes and storms, flew into vistas and sights both breathtaking and life-giving, it soared just as it was tossed. I loved it. Late nights, lack of sleep, lots of laughter...sigh.

As we start this season of the fall, when God's World can no longer be held in the swelter, when leaves give up their chlorophyll uniforms for the more colorful undergarments of reds and yellows, it is then that I am hope.

Fall is my favorite season.

Surprising since summer was one so blessed I can hardly fathom life getting better.

"Long have I known a glory in it all
But never knew I this:
Here such a passion is
As stretcheth me apart,--Lord, I do fear
Thou'st made the world too beautiful this year..."
(E.St.V.M, portion of "God's World")

Rabbit Trail

Another "weekend" and another adventure with Jonathan. This is becoming a habit. We had great plans to drive to Rockbridge to hear my dear friend Hatcher speak but the drive was just too long and Jonathan didn't finish up work until much later so the VA adventure had to be scrapped for something local. It was for the best; that would have been a bit of a stretch.
We headed to Max Patch, a 4600' bald peak about an hour northwest of Asheville that has what many consider to be the best views in an area full of breathtaking views. We had the place to ourselves (lucky us! Pays to have Tuesday be my Saturday!) and the short trip to the top afforded us plenty of time to settle into the quiet beauty and watch the sunset. Lovely as always. I haven't enjoyed a sunset like that in much too long.

Wednesday we took our time getting going and finally headed out on gravel roads barely wide enough for two cars (luckily we didn't even see another car the whole time) that took us down into Tennessee. I don't tire of seeing miles and miles of young forest.
After a greasy lunch and more exploring we stopped at Big Creek in the Great Smokey National Park for a chance to have a cold mountain stream all to ourselves. After a quick dip we reclined on boulders in the creek, soaking up the sunlight and smelling clean the way one does after experiencing water like that. We watched goldfinches make their way to the water to take their own baths, their yellow feathers splashing and fluffing.

On the hike out we were sort of making our own way back to the camper and I got worried we were on a rabbit trail. Is that what ya'll call them, rabbit trails? Those paths in the woods that look promising, look like they lead somewhere, and then dead end at nothing in particular? I've been thinking about rabbit trails since then and in ways that have nothing to do with hiking. Surprise, I found a metaphor.
Really I've been thinking about hope but since I haven't fully formulated my thoughts on the matter I just leave you knowing that's what I'm thinking about. Not that I really expect you to care, but FYI.

Clandestine

There was this big stink this past weekend about someone stealing and publishing the prayer that Obama left at the western wall in Jerusalem, and all the news organizations then proceeded to publish it while condemning the theft.
Oh irony. You are so pretty.

Prayers are secrets; the whispers and language between a soul and a Great Hope. They are not something to be passed around and shared (unless you are Jabez, then I bet you are just straight pissed at that dude who made a ton of money off of you), a bit to be analyzed by masses.
I've been thinking about secrets lately, those things that adhere themselves to innermost walls and backs of tongues. Those things that never quite make it out; that can't navigate an exit.
Fact is, I loathe 'em. I loathe having them, I loathe when they destroy people. In most cases I see no good in secrets. I had a friend who quipped, "I hate clandestine organizations...unless I'm in them."

Not to say I want every little part of me to be known (I'm not THAT kind of blog owner) but so often I find that secrets do much to separate me from those that love me. But my exposing those secrets to light, I am released from shame, guilt, fear, rejection, judgement. I am freed. But my secrets, my prayers, are mine to be released not someone else's. They are mine.
Yours are yours.

That should be respected.

(This could be taken as if it's some sort of dig or warning to someone; it's totally not. I don't even have anyone with whom I'd have this conversation. Unless you want to start a clandestine organization with me, then lets chat.)

Expectation

I'm always stuck when I come up disappointed and short, when I let the volatile mixture of imagination and expectation plan out events whose simple existence is a stretch. And so I beg. I plead, I haggle, I bargain to try to get what I want, when I want, how I want, in my terms, to satisfy that expectation that really is just an outlet of my deep seeded fears. I treat God like he runs a marketplace and I'm both a petulant child and a savvy businesswoman. I'm needing to curb the loftiness of my expectations. Cling to hope and not live each day in a perpetual letdown. Because it has been a constant tripping over letdowns these past few months and I can't handle it. I need to lower my expectations to something realistic instead of the stratosphere fiction sells as fact and I believe.

Slow Progress

Well here it is, an ending of an era. I am officially no longer the proud owner of a MOAK (Mother of All Keys) at Windy Gap. I have no idea what 6:30am is going to look like on Monday but it will be an adjustment not grabbing that radio, those keys, that nametag and driving those 30 minutes; my quality time with NPR. I'm ready to leave, ready to not be in this holding pattern, but realizing I'm just moving on to do that elsewhere doesn't help much. I'm thankful to WG for the work, for the patience, the friendships and the lessons. I never quite fit in and most of the time I liked that. I'm really just going to miss the faces of friends. That consistency.

This past summer was a time of such promise for me, feeling sheer joy in potential. In jobs, friendships, relationships, the future, life in general, being in great shape. And I know potential is fickle, believe me, but this summer was the first time I ever actually entertained it. It was the first time I left my logic at home and let with my heart, and even where I am today I'm glad I did it. I lived differently if only for a short while. I don't know when or if I'll be able to do it again, but the simple notion that once in a while my mind is forced to relinquish control is a bit of hope for me. That's a slow progress.

How is potential detrimental to faith? Is it? Where do potential and faith cross—the making of ones own vague, idealistic plans in the face of eagerly seeking the will of God—and if they do cross, where is the compromise? Why are we made to hope so strongly when hope and faith often crash into each other?

Anyway, off to the beach in SC for a wknd away. Needed.