words and notes: thoughts of a writer, singer, and teacher
Thanks to Hilary for sharing this video.
I hate the word vulnerability.
I like Brene because she isn’t some milquetoast, weak, soft-talking woman.
She’s tough and honest and convicting and…vulnerable all at the same time.
Okay, I admit it: I definitely judge a book by its cover.
But even more than that: I judge a book by its title.
I saw this book in the “Self-Sufficient” section of Barnes and Noble (forgive me, small independent bookstores! you are still my number-one!), and I bought it. I love the title, and no, I do not care that it was coined to catch people just like me, those of us who are easily amused. I went home immediately and started reading, getting engrossed in Kimball’s love story (Mark was just about to make a move!) when, to my horror, I found that the book was MISSING 30 PAGES!
You cannot imagine my anger.
There was no way I was going to read ahead, so I had to wait two days til I could get a new copy.
I am about 2/3 of the way done now, and I love it. Kimball is honest and I find that pretty refreshing; she doesn’t pretend that the love she and Mark have makes farming easy.
And she’s had her own mishaps with dumb mistakes.
There are a lot of moments in the book that I appreciate, but here are a few:
One of the gorgeous and highly annoying things about Mark’s personality is that, once he bites into an idea, he’ll worry it to death, exploring every possibility, expanding it to the point of absurdity and then shrinking it back down, molding it around different premises, and bending logic, when necessary, to cram it into a given situation. No matter what he is doing or saying or thinking, the idea is perking away in the background of his formidable brain, details accruing (57).
A farm is a form of expression, a physical manifestation of the inner life of its farmers. The farm will reveal who you are, whether you like it or not. That’s art (157).
I was in love with the work, too, despite its overabundance. The world had always seemed disturbingly chaotic to me, my choices too bewildering. I was fundamentally happier, I found, with my focus on the ground. For the first time, I could clearly see the connection between my actions and their consequences. I knew why I was doing what I was doing, and I believed in it (158).
The only annoying thing, then, is the fact that I was not the person to write this book.
I have been avoiding C.S. Lewis for awhile now, ever since I attempted Mere Christianity with little progress. He seemed dry and dull and far too intellectual – nothing like my experience with faith. But after prodding from a dear friend, “Give it a try, Cath. Trust me. It’s one of my favorites.”, I picked up the beautiful copy of Lewis’s The Four Loves that had sat on my bookshelf, unnoticed and certainly unloved.
There is nothing better than a beautiful book beside your bed, waiting for you to put the day aside and enter into someone else’s thoughts, even for a little while.
Here was a man I felt I had met before. What could a balding Anglican Brit have in common with a young American woman from the twenty-first-century? No longer did he seem like an emotionless intellectual, but he wrote like someone who had struggled with the same things I am working through. Lewis doesn’t leave his intellect behind in The Four Loves, but he uses it to delve into the human experience and show the manifestations of God’s love here on earth. He divides love into four categories – Affection, Friendship, Eros, and Charity – and shows the different aspects of God’s character in each. Of course, I enjoyed some more than others (who doesn’t like a good discussion of eros?), but the truth is, all four are interconnected. They overlap and share some of the beautiful qualities that make each one worthwhile, each one important to our fullness. “We need others physically, emotionally, intellectually; we need them if we are to know anything, even ourselves,” Lewis says (215). This acknowledgment of our need, rather than making me actually feel needy, allowed me to breathe more deeply. So this desire I feel for communion, for friendship, for relationship with others, is good? It isn’t (necessarily) misplaced need? I’ve known for awhile that we were created to be in communion (who has spent any time at a Christian university WITHOUT hearing that?!), but here, now, finally, I can see why. A reflection of the Trinity, yes. But a window to the self, as well.
Pope John Paul II, in his “On the Dignity and Vocation of Women on the Occasion of the Marian Year” reminds us:
For every individual is made in the image of God, insofar as he or she is a rational and free creature capable of knowing God and loving him. Moreover, we read that man cannot exist “alone” (cf. Gen 2:18); he can exist only as a “unity of the two”, and therefore in relation to another human person…Being a person in the image and likeness of God thus also involves existing in a relationship, in relation to the other “I” (III.7).
So I’m getting it from all sides, this interconnectedness, this relationship. I watched “Anne of Green Gables” last night, and I was immediately transported to girlhood. I remember longing for Anne’s idea of a”bosom friend,” a “kindred spirit,” and even now, as I watched and nearly quoted each line as it came, I realized that that is still what I seek. The difference is, though, that there are more kindred spirits than I thought (Anne says the same later on). I’ve found some in the strangest places – growing up down the street, studying the perplexing subject of English (what in the world is its use?!), living in my surprise apartment senior year of college. I even found one working at the tea shop.
I guess all that to say, love and its many forms continue to fascinate me. Affection and Eros, Friendship and Charity, they have such possibility, such potential to bring peace and hope and comfort. Kindred spirits are hiding just down the street, just at the next table, sipping their own cups of coffee and smiling to themselves as they read. They could have written books over fifty years ago, only to be discovered and appreciated by you so much later. They could also be burning their own granola.
To always be looking for those kindred spirits. That sounds like a good champagne toast to me.
As part of my attempt to reconnect with my “younger self” (a.k.a. rediscover things I used to do before I went to college…), I’ve been making granola. I didn’t even know you could make granola when I was younger, but if I had, I would’ve been the first one on the bandwagon. Anything that was natural and more self-sufficient was worth trying in my book (hence my willow-stick broom I made, just like the one in Little House…needless to say it was used once and then lovingly retired to a corner of my bedroom).
I know I’m not the only person to make granola, but oddly, it makes me feel pretty good. Mixing the oats, almonds, pecans, honey. It’s the yummiest, least-expensive, healthiest alternative to store-bought cereal I’ve found. And it’s not like we have a shortage of honey – we jarred around thirty pounds yesterday after church, and now they sit gleaming golden on our counter.
After I bake the granola and let it cool, I break it up into chunks. I mix in dried cranberries and chopped up apricots and put the whole thing in large glass container. Not only does it taste delicious, it looks delicious, and it’s hard for me not to slap my mom’s hand when she reaches in for “just another taste”!
Yesterday, I went to the store and got all the ingredients. I hate going to the grocery store, so this in itself was a feat.
Then I mixed everything up, patted it into a lined baking sheet, and popped it in the oven.
Forty minutes later, a charcoal mess emerges from the oven, stinking and black and horrible. I just kind of stared at it.
This isn’t my first time around the block. What happened? I broke off a piece and tentatively tasted it – Disgusting. What a waste! Maybe I should eat it anyway? I could hide the burntness with lots of fruit and yogurt, maybe? I’d decided my last granola was a little too sweet, so this time I mixed in extra honey and no brown sugar at all. That was the only change I could think of, and I don’t even know if that’s enough to burn a perfectly good granola.
I’m hoping my next installment of Natural Living will have a more positive result, but right now there’s a slab of black granola on my counter. I think I’ll feed it to the chickens. They’re not too picky.
It’s been a slow letting-go of my ideas for the next phase. Slow, but amazingly blessed. I was shocked to hear myself say to God, “Okay, fine. If You really don’t want me to do this, to go there, to change in this way, bless me in other ways. Give me more, here, so I know.”
The audacity.
I did feel audacious and I did feel far outside the bounds of prayer and worship. But now I’m wondering if there really is such a thing.
I may not be going far away, but now I have a box filled with chicks in my bedroom (yes, my bedroom!). I fall asleep to their cheeping, and I hold their small, soft bodies in my hands and marvel that in a few weeks they will be completely different. Smell, look, sound, almost nothing will be recognizable as these tiny chicks I now hold.
I may not be working with inner-city high school students, but last night I presented a new music program for local children. Name after name on the sheet until it was full. My throat hoarse from explaining my vision, my goal, my ideas. So many different ages, I’ll have to split it into at least two classes, and I say to the Lord, Thank you.
I may not be moving half-way across the country, getting my own place (who decided that was the mark of adulthood, anyway?), but I am getting certified to teach English as a foreign language in a month. Four glorious weeks where I get to be the instructed instead of the instructor. Train rides and strolling my old haunts, Berkeley and Boylston, Newbury and Arlington. Maybe even a beautiful evening picnic at the Gardens, during which time I will people watch to my heart’s content.
It’s rare for me to be able to move on from things quickly. I hold on to people and things and ideas far too tightly. Maybe it’s out of fear. I’d like to think it’s out of love. Passion. Excitement. And I am not going to say that none of these things matter, because they do. Yes, we are to get fulfillment in Christ. But He enjoyed friendship, good wine, and a vocation that filled Him. We should enjoy these things too.
It’s realizing that they are only good in the Lord. We enjoy them because of Him. Can you imagine creating such beauty and it not being enjoyed? Maybe that is part of our purpose after all.
Dancing as worship. Dancing as expression. Dancing as movement. Dancing as communion.
Self-awareness.
To dance without being seen. To dance alone in the dark. To dance in a room full of people. To feel isolated and in community.
The beauty of motion.
Dancing is something I take pretty seriously.
When I say dancing, I don’t mean structured dance class or ballet. I mean hardcore on-the-dance-floor-looking-kind-of-crazy dancing. The kind that a lot of people are scared of. I take it seriously because I love it, but I don’t take it seriously at all because I am not in the least concerned with how well I dance. Or at least, that’s what I tell myself.
It’s hard for me to pass up an invitation to dance, but don’t get the idea that I’m any good. I’m pretty terrible, more of a flailer than a dancer – all elbows and knees and sweaty forehead – and yet I can’t seem to get enough of it. The melding of a good beat with the muscles and bones and tendons God has given me, all moving together and freeing that tightness we all feel but not all of us are aware of. The tightness of holding too much. The tightness of long weeks of doing what we should, and yet still feeling a hole.
I went to a dance party just the other night filled with boys and girls and hipsters and intellectuals and agnostics and Christians and people who drank and people who didn’t drink. Some made only a brief appearance in the dark basement with flashing lights and sound mixing, standing a good head and shoulders above everyone just long enough to decide “dancing wasn’t for them.” These people promptly turned around and headed back up the wooden stairs to resume investigating the link between “What is life?” and “What is art?”, all while consuming (perhaps) a little too much alcohol. Then there were the boys who would’ve done anything to dance with a girl, sneaking up to them, touching their hands, their arms, hoping that at least one of the feminine among them would comply. This crowd, though, would have none of it, and alas, I found that the genders do better mixing at senior centers than they do at a vastly Christian dance party.
Darkness, lights flashing, faces distorted by the sharpness. Bodies I recognized and bodies I didn’t, shaking and moving in a freeness some only dream of.
I danced and thought, this is when I feel free. I’ve been searching for those moments more often lately, trying to understand why I feel trapped and how to stop feeling that way. One of the boys at the party hadn’t danced in forever and he looked so nervous (and quite stupid, frankly), with his arms close to his side and his feet shuffling awkwardly on the cement floor. I leaned in to him and said above the music, “Just pretend no one can see you. That’s the best way to dance.”
He looked at me, and excitement mixed with the fear in his dark eyes.
I don’t know if he tried it or if it worked, because I moved away from him to another group of friends across the room.
That, though, is seriously some of the best advice I can think of. Pretend no one’s watching. Just dance. Just do what you want.
There’s so much freedom in it.
Back from a week of the midwest. How’d I do with my list?
Um, St. Louis closes down on Mondays. No art museums were open! But my girlfriends and a husband and I rode the tram up to the arch and looked out over the city. While we waited to go up, we strolled through the Lewis and Clark museum, so I guess that can count. The tram was like a little capsule for five people. We only had four in our group, so some unsuspecting bald man had to squeeze in with us. And the three of us girls sure know how to be annoying when we’re happy. Poor guy.
And I come home, a little more broke than when I left. But who’s complaining? Too many good memories to care.
“You live a fairy tale, you know,” my first boyfriend said to me. We were driving somewhere in his toyota station wagon, and I was telling him stories about growing up. I can’t remember what it was – maybe it was that I took horseback riding lessons, or maybe it was that we used to spend a week every summer on a lake in Maine – but whatever it was, I guess it made my childhood sound pretty idyllic.
“What do you mean?” I knew I’d had a good life, that there were beautiful moments of laughing til my sides hurt, of roping my brothers, sister, and cousins into playing “Little House on the Prairie,” and of boisterous family holidays where sometimes it was hard to hear anything that was going on. “Everything’s always been so easy for you,” he said, not looking at me. “Everything was so easy.”
What he didn’t see though, was that while things looked easy, there is always more. I think back on that afternoon in his car, and I wonder what my life looks like from the outside now. Graduating in May was a huge change, and I’ve made some choices I really didn’t want to make: I moved back home with loving parents and a great younger brother, but sacrificed living with friends and independence. I took a few part-time jobs because I get bored out of my mind working at a desk, doing the same thing day to day. But this leaves me with uncertain hours, a smaller income, and more than anything the feeling that I’m not accomplishing much.
As I begin to piece together what my life will look like, I balance between learning patience and practicing action. I am much more prone to act than I am to wait; I see a problem, a challenge, a choice, and I want to conquer it. Maybe this period of waiting, of patience, of trust, is necessary to shape me more finely. But it’s really uncomfortable.
“Everything’s always been easy for you.” Those words echo in my head, making me feel an odd mix of resentment and un-deserved privilege.
I step back and see the blessings, and I am grateful. I look forward to sharing the fairy tale life, even if it isn’t always such a fairy tale.
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