Pre-Christmas Hike

When people ask me, I will tell them we climbed all the way to the summit. This will be followed quickly by, “Well, actually, we only made it to the warming hut a bit below.” (My conscience often beats out my desire to tell a good story.)

I will tell them that a sunrise climb in December is the best idea ever.

I will tell them that everyone should do it at least once.

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(our hiding spot from the groomers)

If they dig a little deeper though, I might tell them that there were times I thought I wouldn’t make it any further. That when I walked through a snow-covered stretch of running water, filling my boots, I wasn’t sure if I would even start the climb. That when I fell through the snow along the tree line WAY ABOVE MY KNEE, I pulled a muscle that hurt with every step.

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But what I’ll also tell them, is that when I fell behind the group (which was every single time), they stopped and waited. When I apologized left and right for being slow, for being out of breath, they told me not to worry, that it wasn’t a race, that we’d all make it to the top together.

And I’ll tell them that when I sat down 3/4 of the way up to take my boots off, change my icy socks, and tuck warmers in the arches of my feet, two of them held lights up for me to see, while another held my backpack.

That we toasted our climb with champagne and peach rings and wrote our initials on the wall of the hut.

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That I gazed down over the valley and surrounding mountains and thought, God made this. It was in his mind, and he made it.

I’ll tell them I was overwhelmed and proud and grateful. That I looked at the three of them, my climbing companions, and praised God for the mountains.

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Snapshots of a Friendship

One time we made a cake just like Laura Ingalls’s wedding cake. We beat the eggs against a wooden cutting board with forks, “to be authentic.” It wasn’t very good.

We used to have pinecone fights in the neighborhood, run around gathering the wet, sharp cones and then hurl them mercilessly at the other team. We loved it, but the neighbor kids told their parents and we were outcast. We thought at least we were better than our dad and his friends, who used to throw hard little acorns at each other.

Once, in the woods, we all crawled through frozen underbrush to the little stream that had frozen over. It was the coldest it had ever been. We slid on our bellies along the ice, the tall snow-bent weeds hanging over us to make a canopy. We’re like seals, I said.

Man-hunt. The game of summer nights and over-excited pre-teens. We raced around town with flashlights, screaming, scared and exhilarated. She had a crush on the neighbor boy, so that made night-time chasing even more fun.

We used to talk about when we grew up, getting married. She said I’d definitely be in her wedding. I said she’d definitely be in mine. She said she wanted to be seventeen. I said, Oh my gosh, no.

She invited me to Starbucks in September, offered to pay. I should’ve known.

Will you be my Maid of Honor?

I sipped my caramel macchiato.

Yes, I will be your Maid of Honor.

Every December, we had a Christmas Feast. We filled stockings for each other, wrapped up inexpensive gifts, baked a little chicken (with Mom’s patient help). Every year we would string popcorn and cranberries, watch “White Christmas,” and drink hot chocolate with homemade whipped cream.

This December, we will go dress shopping. I will sit quietly as she tries on dress after dress. I will watch her and think about throwing pinecones at each other, concocting terrible plays about wilderness adventures, walking to get ice cream on summer afternoons.

Her mother and sisters and I will laugh and chat while she’s in the dressing room. We will marvel at the passing of time, the beauty of her smile, her excitement.

It feels like the blink of an eye since we were little girls. Thank goodness she waited til twenty-three.

Blessings and Friendships

This past year (and really, the past year and a half) has been filled with such a mix of things. I wouldn’t call myself a planner — it’s not that I need every step in between before I do anything- but there is a huge part of me that anticipates. I imagine each phase of life, each moment, and when it doesn’t go exactly as planned, it takes me a long time to adjust to reality.

There are times when I feel so overwhelmed by God’s goodness and His gifts that I look at my life and think wow. But then — and sometimes even on the same day — I am equally overwhelmed by the things that are less than perfect. By the hurt I’ve experienced. By the disappointments I’ve faced and/or brought upon myself.

What does it mean when things don’t work out?

What does God want me to learn from all this?

Is it really a scale? Because sometimes, when a good thing happens, I think shoot, what bad thing is just around the corner?

This is not the way we are called to live.

~    ~     ~

I was reading through my journal from last year. It was a hard journal and a hard year. It was filled with confusion, anger, sadness. It’s not fun when someone you thought you knew ends up being a different color after all, a different person from the one you trust. Graduation loomed, and despite all the freedom and newness and excitement that could bring, I was scared.

In the midst of all this, I made a list. It’s what I do.

I listed all the blessings God had given me over the year. It was long. It was diverse.

But what struck me most was the amount of people.

Family. My mother who never tells me she’s too busy. My father who, in his quiet and roundabout way, lets me know that he understands my pain. My brothers and sister who have seen each twist and turn I’ve made as I’ve tried to grow into the woman I was created to be.

Friends. Almost my whole life, I have felt a lack of kindred spirits. There were a few growing up, definitely. Good, fun friends who shaped me. But that didn’t change the fact that I always felt different. It wasn’t until the past few years that I finally feel a kinship with young women like me.

This week I called K. I was driving in my car, and I felt so overwhelmed. Deadlines were coming so fast and I HATE missing deadlines. I was scared about my hospital appointment and I was scared that I wasn’t doing the right thing. So I asked her to pray for me.

She was driving too, but she prayed right there. Over the phone.

I cried while I drove, sadness and joy mixed in.

Because sometimes that is how life is.

Praise God for friends like that.

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.

After-Work Conversations

Last night I went out with my coworker (I actually hate that term. Makes it sound like I don’t really like her — we’re not friends — when we most certainly are.). We’d planned to go to one of our favorite pubs: dark, cozy, inexpensive, towny, the kind of place that doesn’t demand anything from you. It was closed, of course, and we had to run back to my car through the rain, cursing our lack of planning and horrible luck.

We headed to another small town to see if we could get in to a restaurant I knew, but just before we opened the door we saw the sign “Must have valid State I.D.” and we had to turn around with our heads hanging. K. is from out-of-state, and so again, we were thwarted.

Finally we ended up at a place neither of us had been. It didn’t have quite the same ease of the other pub, and it was terribly and perfectly suited to our passionate conversations of faith: what it means that Eve was created last and how wrong it seems to us that this is used to crown her as the “best of creation,” and how do we reconcile the fact that the Bible is inspired and yet heavily influenced by human culture and society? When I get out of work, I feel this release, like I MUST TALK ABOUT EVERYTHING NOW.  The Bruins game was on the five surrounding televisions, grown men yelling at the score, their graphic t-shirts stretched tight across their stomachs, and we sat at the corner of the bar, two suspiciously uninterested young women who seemed, probably, a little crazy.

I realized I’ve stopped caring what people think. Okay, that’s not entirely true. Or even most of the way true. But last night, I didn’t care that we didn’t fit in with the sports crowd. I didn’t care that we were talking about God and relationships and Calvinism and what it means to have a marriage that points to Christ. A year or two ago, I would’ve tried to keep my voice down. I would have made sure no one could hear how much I care about these things.

Now, I wasn’t up on the table screaming.

But I didn’t feel shame, either.

I feel more energized after talks like that than I do when I wake up in the morning.

I feel more ready to be excited about life.

This photo has absolutely nothing to do with my post, but I CAN’T WAIT FOR STRAWBERRIES.

The Four Loves and Kindred Spirits

 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.

A Tough Decision

A lot of things get decided on walks.

Maybe it’s being outside, swinging your arms, the fast change of scenery as you process. I think it has a lot to do with the combining of mind and body – thought and motion.

Last night, I decided not to take a job.

I was so excited about it. The email came, siren-calling me to a job that I could actually see myself doing. A job that would use so many of the skills I’d acquired in college, but that I knew would challenge me, too. A job that would require the huge move I’d been longing for.

But this same job paid nothing. Nothing. And on top of that, there is a mysterious surgery looming in my future. I’ve been in denial for a few weeks now, but something is coming. Even in my scared state, I actually considered moving halfway across the country to a place where I know no one. I’ll be fine. It won’t REALLY take me six months to recover. Please. This is the twenty-first century.

Last night, I walked quickly beside a dear friend. We went up steep hills (reminding me of my treacherous experience with Philosopher’s Weg in Heidelberg, Germany…too much huffing and puffing for much philosophizing on my part!). We crossed busy streets and were nearly run over by crazed cyclists. All the while, talking incessantly as I tried to convince her and convince myself that it wasn’t crazy. It wasn’t crazy to pick up my life a few weeks after major surgery and move far, far away. It wasn’t crazy to make less money than I needed to pay back my student loans. It wasn’t crazy to think that running away would make me happy.

I wonder what passers-by thought, seeing two slightly-agitated young women, mouths unable to pause long enough to think.

Before we got back to her cozy apartment, I knew the answer.

No job.

No big move.

No adventure.

At least, not the adventure I’d been sure of. Trusting that God knows what I need. Having the faith to let it go, the thing I was holding on to so dearly that I was willing to overlook some huge obstacles. Praying that He would help me to trust Him more. Who knows? Maybe my recovery time will be like lightning, and I’ll find myself on the shores of some distant land, teaching English and sipping a deliciously strong drink. Or maybe I’ll hit my stride as a tea marketer, getting account after account of bridal favors. Or perhaps I will FINALLY find a way to put into words everything that’s been building building inside me.

I think I’ll start with a new flock of chicks. They’re pretty cute.

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[The triumphant photo after climbing Mount Untersberg. There’s no better feeling in the world.]