Idle and Blessed

I'm not sure about you guys, but 2017 has turned out to be a pretty rough year for me. I can't even remember where my head was on January 1 (didn't I have a theme for the year or something?), but I can say with certainty I reached none of my goals or expectations or intentions for 2017. It was a whole different animal. Not that it has been devoid of good things; like all of life it's been a mixture of good and bad, joy and despair, peace and fear, calm and chaos. But we moved twice this year, and I quit two jobs, and I've spent a whole year applying to PhD programs and I'm not done yet. Lots of change, uncertainty, stirring up, letting go, saying no, saying yes, uprooting. In some ways, I am ending this year more in touch with myself than ever before. I've said yes to my needs this year, and said a painful no to some other people in the process. I've spent time, tears, and heartache exploring some of my coping strategies for life that haven't alw...

God is like the moment in a forest when the wind stops and no one is breathing and there are somehow no squirrels and for a moment there is absolutely nothing except the world just being . For a moment, not even a hint of change. Not even a hint that God breathes. Isn’t he supposed to breathe? And I’m the one just dancing on the leaves and making some ruckus to encourage God to start talking to me in the forest, or at least laughing at my silliness, not because I’m afraid of the quiet, but because I’m concerned that God has stopped breathing. I’m the little girl running and jumping on God’s body earth, poking him to wake, tugging at his leg, like a daughter pulling on her dad’s coat from so far below. “Hello there God, let’s make some noise, do you like me, do you hear me, are you awake?” I know God is I Am ( is-ness ) and maybe there are moments when God dances with us but I haven’t seen that side of God in a very long time. One time I saw a dog run over in the midd...

Dear self, I know you crave wholeness, and you think that means perfection, like somehow being imperfect will shatter you into pieces of unimportance. Like plastic jewelry crushed on a sidewalk, only useful for the moment it made someone else happy. I know you think the way to wholeness, perfection, is efficiency in all your tasks, like there's a shortage of time on the clock of your life, and laughing wastes the seconds and the oxygen around them. Like you must take up less space in the world, and do things faster, and do them better. And stop breathing so much. I know you think your feelings need to justify themselves to you before appearing, and that you are worried about letting them run the show. And I know there are good reasons you've come to see emotions this way, and that you are protecting yourself, and I want to tell you that's ok. I want to tell you it's ok to face the fears that are underneath your controlled calm waters. I want to tell you there ...

[it sounds cliche, but,] God is a lot like the ocean. Its waves are steady...relentless. There's no end to its supply. It moves things and is moved by them. Has no clear boundary. It looks a little bit different every day. A new vantage point can alter your perspective completely. Some days are chaotic, loud. Powerful and strong. Other days, just still. Silent. It can beat up that sand, and push you over, nose burning, throat coughing. Yet fosters all the life that exists. Jellyfish, sea turtles, me. Tiny protozoa. Gross thing like that. And also, us. I don't know why God knocks us over, and is other times surfable and warm. I don't know why God is so salty and un-thirst-quenching (or perfectly sustaining, if you're another sort of creature) (depends on where you are born) (unfortunately) But I do know the beach never holds onto its shape. And after each wave, it changes. Does not cling to "I...

There is so much talk in our culture, especially my 20-something micro-culture, about finding your bliss: waking up every morning to the dream you've created for yourself. That job that fulfills you, and pays you to get lost in the flow of your passion. I have friends who are entrepreneurs, creatives, curators, business-savvy purveyors or fashionable social media experts. Friends who seem to be making everything in their world turn out so beautifully for the good - owning homes, landing the careers, having the pretty babies on the side. I'm glad we are waking up to the possibility that God created us to do things that matter and affect change in our society. But some days I just feel like there's something wrong with me if I don't have that fulfilling job, or at least a plan to get there. A niche market for my skills. Or if there's no niche market, it's cool, as long as I'm a self-starter who created it for myself a couple years ago. The most excitin...

Enrique Martinez Celaya, world-renowned painter and physicist, decided to burn all his paintings in the late 80's. It was a significant pivot point in his career, post-apprenticeship and pre-success. He said he needed to build painting from the ground up.  So he destroyed all his paintings, and began to paint differently.  " I eliminated from my painting anything that anybody has ever said that I was good at. So if I was good at drawing, I took it out. If I was told I had facility with color, I took it out. And then I said, 'Well, if I give up all these things, what is painting, for me?'" Most of us spend our lives chasing success so desperately that we never give ourselves the freedom to explore the meaning of our lives without it. Or rather, the meaning of success without the ease of using our patterns and strengths. Maybe success is not phoning it in, staying in our lane, but honing our craft for the sake of the process itself. Maybe rejec...

My backyard is an oasis. Every morning I sit in my office and look out on (what seems to me like) a great expanse of lush greenness, teeming with life. The trees soar above, tiers of small-to-large bushes line the perimeter, and the middle is a gentle slope of grass. Birds never stop singing, and the sun or rain quietly finds its way through pockets of tree leaves down to the grassy floor. There is a perfect mix of steadiness and movement - the old still trees with their ever-flitting leaves embodying both together. And the creatures. The red cardinals and tiny finches, the birds that fight with squirrels, the birds that nest in the birdhouse. The chipmunks, the leaf cutter bees, and my favorite, the bunny who prefers early evening and rainy days. There is a constant flurry of movement in the yard, but you might only notice if you sit still enough to watch the window for a while. When you do, you will notice another constant sound: the highway, with cars like ocean waves that nev...

Dear Lord, I have swept and I have washed but still nothing is as shining as it should be for you. Under the sink, for example, is an uproar of mice -- it is the season of their many children. What shall I do? And under the eaves and through the walls the squirrels have gnawed their ragged entrances -- but it is the season when they need shelter, so what shall I do? And the raccoon limps into the kitchen and opens the cupboard while the dog snores, the cat hugs the pillow; what shall I do? Beautiful is the new snow falling in the yard and the fox who is staring boldly up the path, to the door. And still I believe you will come, Lord: you will, when I speak to the fox, the sparrow, the lost dog, the shivering sea-goose, know that really I am speaking to you whenever I say, as I do all morning and afternoon: Come in, Come in. - Mary Oliver

The Sycamore by Wendell Berry In the place that is my own place, whose earth I am shaped in and must bear, there is an old tree growing, a great sycamore that is a wondrous healer of itself. Fences have been tied to it, nails driven into it, hacks and whittles cut in it, the lightning has burned it. There is no year it has flourished in that has not harmed it. There is a hollow in it that is its death, though its living brims whitely at the lip of the darkness and flows outward. Over all its scars has come the seamless white of the bark. It bears the gnarls of its history healed over. It has risen to a strange perfection  in the warp and bending of its long growth. It has gathered all accidents into its purpose. It has become the intention and radiance of its dark fate. It is a fact, sublime, mystical and unassailable. In all the country there is no other like it. I recognize in it a principle, an indwelling the same as itself, and grea...

Lent. Fasting. Remembrance of hard times. Acknowledgement of weakness. A sitting with pain.  Attentiveness to mortality, echoing: “You are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Lent reminds us even God was tested, starving in the desert, like our father Moses and his fearful people. And so we expect this dark season of testing, in our yearly calendar but also in our lives. We expect and acknowledge the darkness. Jesus’ excruciating isolation in the desert, like the Israelites’ before him, had the paradoxical effect of fortifying his spirit against the things that would destroy it. If we pay attention, we may learn that times of testing – fasting – darkness – isolation –  strengthen our spirits for the journey ahead. The paradox of fasting. The paradox of Lent. A paradox of our faith. During Lent, we do not temporarily abstain from evil, but renew our commitment to wholly reject it. We do not put aside...

Debt. Forgotten debt. This is the way Eula Biss describes the state of whiteness in America in her 2015 article for the New York Times. “When he was 4, my son brought home a library book about the slaves who built the White House. I didn’t tell him that slaves once accounted for more wealth than all the industry in this country combined, or that slaves were, as Ta-Nehisi Coates writes, ‘‘the down payment’’ on this country’s independence, or that freed slaves became, after the Civil War, ‘‘this country’s second mortgage.’’ Nonetheless, my overview of slavery and Jim Crow left my son worried about what it meant to be white, what legacy he had inherited. ‘‘I don’t want to be on this team,’’ he said, with his head in his hands. ‘‘You might be stuck on this team,’’ I told him, ‘‘but you don’t have to play by its rules.’’ Even as I said this, I knew that he would be encouraged, at every juncture in his life, to believe wholeheartedly in the power of his own hard work an...