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Hospitals, Cake, and Stories

After a long day of babysitting, I came home and ate a piece of cake.

It was delicious.

Two days spent trying to figure out the next step — hospitals are scary, but every single one of the doctors and nurses was kind. They took care of me. Robert kept asking me if I was okay, if I was comfortable. It was strange when he said, “Nice to meet you,” and I realized that I’d never see this man again, after two hours of him almost holding my hand.

Still no idea, so today I went back to work and ate cake.

[The little girl I watch makes up songs and stories like it’s her job. Example:

Pre-schooler: My boyfriend’s the greatest.

Me: Really? What makes him the greatest?

Pre-schooler: He gives me popcorn every day.

If only it were that simple. ]

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From Dark to Light

“Thomas Jefferson didn’t believe in miraculous things,” my high school history teacher told us. “He rewrote the gospels, taking out all the miraculous events.”

I went home and looked it up – there it was: a miracle-less version of the gospel. I remember thinking how boring the whole thing was. And then I got to the end (it’s a little long, but it’s worth it):

And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?

Some of them that stood there, when they heard that, said, This man calleth for Elijah.
And straightway one of them ran, and took a sponge, and filled it with vinegar, and put it on a reed, and gave him to drink.
The rest said, Let him be, let us see whether Elijah will come to save him.
Jesus, when he had cried out again with a loud voice, yielded up the ghost.
And many women were there beholding afar off, which followed Jesus from Galilee, ministering unto him:
Among which was Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James and Joseph, and the mother of Zebedee’s sons.
The Jews therefore, because it was the day of preparation, that the bodies should not remain upon the cross on the sabbath, (for that sabbath was an high day,) besought Pilate that their legs might be broken, and that they might be taken away.
Then came the soldiers, and brake the legs of the first, and of the other which was crucified with him.
But when they came to Jesus, and saw that he was dead already, they brake not his legs:
But one of the soldiers with a spear pierced his side, and forthwith came there out blood and water.
And after this Joseph of Arimathaea, being a disciple of Jesus, but secretly for fear of the Jews, besought Pilate that he might take away the body of Jesus: and Pilate gave him leave. He came therefore, and took the body of Jesus.
And there came also Nicodemus, which at the first came to Jesus by night, and brought a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about an hundred pound weight.
Then took they the body of Jesus, and wound it in linen cloths with the spices, as the manner of the Jews is to bury.
Now in the place where he was crucified there was a garden; and in the garden a new sepulchre, wherein was never man yet laid.
There laid they Jesus,

And rolled a great stone to the door of the sepulchre, and departed.

I have never felt the power of Christ’s sacrifice until that point. Tears streamed down my face, and I realized for the first time that, if this Jeffersonian take were true, all was meaningless. I had never seen such hopelessness. There was no good, no hope, no joy.

It took complete absence of hope to show me the magnitude of Christ’s sacrifice, and it gave just a glimpse of what life would be like if we really were left with nothing to look towards.

I remind myself of this when all I can hear, all I can feel, is Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? The Psalms cry out to God in pain, in suffering. They do not make excuses or pretend that the suffering is less than it is. They call it what it is: horrible.

And then the Psalmists remember what God has told them. They remember what God has shown Himself to be.

A friend set this Psalm for me to sing at my senior recital. I chose it then because I knew what it was like to be in a dark stage of life, and now the light had dawned bright and warm. Every time I read it, now that I have been in another dark place (I almost wrote “somewhat dark,” but who am I kidding? If the Psalmists don’t pretend everything’s okay, maybe I shouldn’t either.), I am reminded of the hope I have in Christ.

Psalm 77

I cried out to God for help;
I cried out to God to hear me.
2 When I was in distress, I sought the Lord;
at night I stretched out untiring hands,
and I would not be comforted.

3 I remembered you, God, and I groaned;
I meditated, and my spirit grew faint.[b]
4 You kept my eyes from closing;
I was too troubled to speak.
5 I thought about the former days,
the years of long ago;
6 I remembered my songs in the night.
My heart meditated and my spirit asked:

7 “Will the Lord reject forever?
Will he never show his favor again?
8 Has his unfailing love vanished forever?
Has his promise failed for all time?
9 Has God forgotten to be merciful?
Has he in anger withheld his compassion? ”

10 Then I thought, “To this I will appeal:
the years when the Most High stretched out his right hand.
11 I will remember the deeds of the Lord;
yes, I will remember your miracles of long ago.
12 I will consider all your works
and meditate on all your mighty deeds.”

13 Your ways, God, are holy.
What god is as great as our God?
14 You are the God who performs miracles;
you display your power among the peoples.
15 With your mighty arm you redeemed your people,
the descendants of Jacob and Joseph.

16 The waters saw you, God,
the waters saw you and writhed;
the very depths were convulsed.
17 The clouds poured down water,
the heavens resounded with thunder;
your arrows flashed back and forth.
18 Your thunder was heard in the whirlwind,
your lightning lit up the world;
the earth trembled and quaked.
19 Your path led through the sea,
your way through the mighty waters,
though your footprints were not seen.

20 You led your people like a flock
by the hand of Moses and Aaron.

 

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Can I survive on bantam eggs?!

I switched my flock out about three weeks ago.

We moved the twenty chicks outside as soon as their soft down gave way to feathers. The four bantams – the adorable, miniature birds who enjoy an almost-weekly (and certainly accidental) rendezvous OUTSIDE the chicken house – were not entirely keen on the new additions.

The chicks were still a little smaller than the bantams, and there’s something about chickens that tells older ones (no matter their size), that it’s their job to put the younger ones in place.

That’s exactly what the bantams have done. I’m not too worried about it, cause the chicks are bigger now and things will even out. There’s no visual evidence of pecking, and I just can’t bring myself to get rid of such cute bantams.

My question was, though, can I eat the bantam eggs if they’ve been eating grower pellets?!?!

I know you couldn’t eat them if they were on chick starter since it’s medicated, but what’s the difference between grower and layer food?

After a little trusty web-surfing, I concluded that, yes, I could indeed eat the bantam eggs. The difference is only that layer food has extra calcium to supplement the hen while she’s putting so much energy into laying. There would be no adverse effects from eating the miniscule eggs.

Now the question is: Can I survive another 3-4 months on the eggs of four bantams?!

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Kitchen Gardens and Maintenance

I woke up to the second day of rain and cold. I love cozy days like this – partly because they give me an excuse to be a little lazy.

I thought I’d listen to something while I made my breakfast. Ted Talks is definitely a go-to lately. There are so many interesting things to learn about, and when I hear these eloquent, educated, passionate people talk about what they’ve discovered, I get fired up. There is hope when you know people like that exist.

I listened to this talk, My Subversive Garden Plot, while I boiled water for my french press and made poached eggs on toast.

I thought, as if I really needed another reason to get more involved in the garden…! And then I went on his website to learn more about Kitchen Gardens International. Its title makes it pretty obvious, but it’s an organization that started in Maine, and it’s dedicated to expanding the number of gardens and gardeners around the world. Doiron talked about the fact that in the next fifty years, we will need to produce more food than the world has produced in the last 10,000 years.

When I hear things like that, my initial reaction is fear. But followed quickly after is excitement. I can see my chicken run from the backdoor (granted, it’s raining, so the smart girls are warm in the henhouse), and I can’t wait to collect those first eggs from a new flock. We finished putting the garden in last weekend (Dad and I always have differing opinions – he put a bunch of lima beans in, and I absolutely detest lima beans. Oh well…diversity…). I filled my herb garden with sweet basil, purple basil, parsley, oregano, upright and creeping rosemary, three kinds of thyme, and beautiful white, purple, and orange flowers.

Image

I love planting season. Not so much weeding season. I have a bad track record for maintenance. I wish I could say it were just with the garden, but my writing, my reading, my knitting, my music, pretty much everything I do is affected by quick boredom and inability to FINISH WHAT I START.

That’s my goal this summer – maintain! Maybe if I start with my garden it’ll spill over into the other aspects of my life.

Maybe this summer I’ll be ready for the Farmers’ Market!

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Things I’m Enjoying

Things I’m Enjoying on [arguably] the Most Beautiful Day:

1. Crunchy apples with old-fashioned peanut butter = instant energy and instant deliciousness

2. Riding with the top down and the sun all around me.

3. Taking two little boys to the town common and watching them run/crawl around.

4. Talking about every single car that drives by 🙂

5. Revising lesson plans to the tunes of 90s pop music (thanks, Pandora).

6. Night-time rehearsals of Hot Mikado – and attempting to sing and dance all at the same time (did I mention I’m about a month behind everyone else? we shall see if I can pick any of this up, let alone memorize it in three weeks!!!)

7. Guilty pleasure: Coke Zero. Trying to be healthy, but sometimes, you just want a good soda.

8. Comfy stretch pants. I’m wearing them with the excuse that I’m dancing at rehearsal, but really, I just want to wear comfy stretch pants.

9. Looking out the window and seeing white, red, black, and gold hens in the coop. Chickens are beautiful creatures.

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Wedding Bliss

Saturday I did something for the first time:

I went to my first high-school-friend-wedding.

We all knew it was going to happen since forever ago – they’d been together since junior year (we don’t count the tiny spurt sophomore year…), and the date had been set for almost THREE YEARS.

And yet we couldn’t believe it was here.

We, the other five of us girls and the new significant others, sat in two pews. There was no designated “bride-side” or “groom-side” because they’d pretty much grown up together in church and high school, so it would’ve been weird to split us down the middle.

Some of us teared up at the ceremony. Seriously, she was beautiful. I love it when dark-haired women wear white. It’s stunning. They were both just so happy, and we were all sitting there like, wait, this is really happening?! Someone leaned over and whispered, “They’re actually adults! They’re married!”

S. looked at me and said, “What does that make us?”
And I said, “Not adults and not married.”

Kind of true, I guess.

~   ~   ~

At the reception – during the cocktail hour and decently long photo time – I got so antsy. I couldn’t sit still in the hideously upholstered chair at the country club, so I got up and stood around while my friends talked genteely. I probably looked like a freak. They told me as much. So finally I told them I needed to go for a walk.

I wandered outside for awhile. The grass was bright green and the sun was hot. It was a good day for a wedding.

I think sometimes I get overwhelmed by so many people. I needed some space. To think through what just happened. That it is FOR LIFE. A small moment alone in the sweet-smelling air to gather myself for the long night of celebrating ahead.

We danced like crazy, the bunch of us that, until that night, had all been kept in little “this-is-who-you-were-in-high-school” boxes – now set free to be who we’d become in the last five years.

They’d never seen me dance.

And now the first of us are married, blissful on a little island.

That’s the way to celebrate.

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[Notes from The Student, Part 3]

[train thoughts]

That idea of “do not throw your pearls before swine” keeps running through my head. Maybe it also means that we should be careful who we tell our deepest thoughts to. Maybe we should guard ourselves – not open ourselves up too much to people we call friends, but who time and time again prove less than trustworthy.

K. says we’re dreamers. We think and dream and hope big. And that’s not necessarily bad, but that it could (and probably is) a large part of why we are so often unsatisfied. See the less-than-perfect sides of even our biggest blessings. Maybe dreamers are more likely to be unsatisfied than concrete people.

G. is funny, clever, gets things and people quickly. But there’s not a lot of grace in her. What’s the point of knowledge – even a shade of wisdom – if you don’t have grace? I see too much of myself – of how I could be.

[we don’t have to be all things for all people. we are finite. there is actually a lot of peace in that.]

[that was the only thing about last night; i looked around while i was dancing and just saw so much desperation. it was gross and sad at the same time.]

“I will walk about in freedom, for I have sought out your precepts.” -Psalm 119:45

So seeking after the Lord’s precepts – His laws, His will – is what brings freedom. Structure brings freedom. So counter-intuitive to how I think.

[overheard on the subway: “i went to zara and spent $700 on, like, nothing.”]

Gave a guy 50 cents. Said he needed $2 to get home, but I didn’t have $2 (literally, I did not have it). Can I have just $2? No, I don’t have $2. Can I have all your change? No, you can have 50 cents. Did I just help his drug addiction? Maybe. I don’t know. Where in the Bible does it say, “make sure they use your money wisely”?

[i keep thinking about M. maybe because i realized i’m older than he’ll ever be – i’ve already been given more time. i’m not sure. maybe i should email his mom, tell her we still think about him. tell her a story where he’s the young hero, showing me how to laugh, how to flirt, how to smile into twinkly, mischievous eyes.]

Marriage is such an excluding relationship. When others get married, you are eternally on the outside. Weird.

Don’t reduce your life to only one passion.

[in thinking about “Legends of the Fall” and how grotesque all the characters are; they could have lived beautiful lives, but instead they chose selfishness and reduced themselves to one passion, flattening themselves.]

A lot for a day, and yet only a piece of it.

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Kinship with Strangers

I am already past the halfway-point of my TEFL course, and I can’t believe it.

Mostly because that means the time of decisions is feeling terribly close.

I was hashing it out with someone (my mother? myself? i can’t remember), and I realized that I don’t like this making of decisions. It’s not that I’m indecisive – that is far from any trait I possess – it’s that I hate the idea of being boxed in a year down the road by a choice I make now.

What if something better comes along?
Or if not better, at least different?

What if I choose something and its permanence becomes a chain on my ankle?

I read this article today on Image.org, and despite the differences in our circumstances, the woman sounds scarily like myself at times. She’s scared of making decisions, too, and actually has put off long-term decisions for 22 years.

It seems even people nearly twice my age have the same thoughts.

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[Notes from The Student, Part 2]

Can I just say, I have a new-found respect for Education Majors?

And teachers.

And anyone who is good at planning, being creative, organizing, and then ACTUALLY EXECUTING SAID PLAN.

Wow.

I just finished my second lesson plan (this one was for a listening lesson), and tomorrow is my first day teaching an ESL class. We’ll see how it goes. I tend to get sidetracked by their interesting stories.

For example:

Today, I “acted” as an ESL student because there was only one tried-and-true one (a Russian man, seemingly in his 70s or 80s, not sure…). So I got the privilege of discussing questions with him, answering multiple choice and true/false questions, and trying (overall) to be engaging.

But the thing is, I started talking to him, and I found out he used to fly planes in Russia.

He was a doctor on a helicopter that flew down to help people IN THE TUNDRA. Yes. The tundra.

I felt a little bit like I’d wandered into a novel.

I asked how long he’d worked there. Fourteen years, he said.

Then I asked if he liked it, and he smiled and just said, it was my job, and I was reminded, again that

we do what we are supposed to do

we do our jobs

we do the right thing

and we don’t always have to like it.

There is so much I could learn from this Russian man.

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[P.S. Power-outage in the city today. For blocks. Everyone freaked. Restaurants wouldn’t take cards; people didn’t know what to do with themselves. I was secretly in awe. There’s something I love about remembering that we depend on things, that there are some things out of our control. Like when a huge snowstorm stops life. It’s beautiful, kind of, to remember that we’re finite.]