Dying Season: Quieting Down

I love the rust quiet that climbs into autumn. I love sinking into that atmosphere, feet taking to it first, going slower. The sidewalks are clean, the air seems wrung out, rubbed down. Everything becomes pleasantly raw.

Fall reminds me to quiet down, to just sit in the buzz of other people's laughter, private talks in the cafe, hoops and shouts on the street. I am learning that in new places I become paranoid. I feel desperate for validation, for someone to say, "WOW, I am so glad you stepped into this corner of the world." I find that I am more doubtful, that if someone seems happy to see me, I get very squinty eyed in my deep self. I am chock full of disbelief.

I noticed yesterday that I try to close the gap I create with my paranoia and doubts through speech. I talk a lot. In class I am half dying to answer a question (I am becoming THAT girl). In all honesty, I feel like I have to prove myself. I'm sure just about everyone feels this way in new situations, but I'm becoming exhausted by the desperation of it--the worries.

Yesterday I tried to quiet down. I let myself sit back, I let myself listen. I thought to myself, Is it really such an emergency that you be known, heard, loved? It felt so good, just listening. Just letting myself feel okay about not contributing constantly. I felt more myself, more composed. Immediately I felt that I didn't need to speak. I could if I wanted, but I didn't neeeeed to.

The road from Blacksburg to Roanoke is sometimes unpleasantly long and car-sickness inducing. I plug my ears with so much sound to try to pull me out of the twist-bounce-headache of it. But yesterday afternoon, winding up and down through the mountains in the high-up bus had me looking out at dozens of birds hovering high above the valleys between mountains almost sweatered in pine. I felt the word height press down into my bones. I began to value their distance; the boundaries of birds. They could touch down on a tree top or rise. They could walk in the shadowy woods or cast cloudward. They let themselves mingle, speak, and hover in softest silence.

I remembered times with very dear friends. Andrew and I sitting on a hill side smoking cigars, watching deer, and riding our bikes through town to the fireworks. We were twenty-something-year-old-kids playing, flying kites. Chase and I walking the Hope College campus at 3 a.m. baring our souls, sharing pain. I remembered sitting at Noshville reading Lewis and working through difficult theology till 6 a.m. Paula bringing me Thanksgiving left-overs after I got out of work, walking every subdivision sidewalk, and waiting for meteor showers under dozens of blankets. I remember porch nights with Alicia and our endless conversations.

I felt so lucky, so buoyant. I remembered that by some miracle I met these people and they met me and we prize each other and our memories as some of the best that ever happen. I have my value. Everyday spent with them and other friends and my family and David have just pressed it into me. I forget it. I wake up empty, unfamiliar even to myself.

And I can't wait to grow new friendships here, to still this new space for a moment with a kindred spirit. And I'm excited for that exchange of value, and humanity. But I don't need to prove myself. That is not how friendship, how validation, ever works. You don't work for it. You just let it.

One of the two things I have learned (over and over again...and again this weekend) are to quiet down, listen, and just be. Stop proving. Hold back the need. Listen. Speak words that are true and aren't asking for anything. Secondly, I need belief. I need to start opening up to the possibility that it is okay; that I am okay now.

Here's to a new place and the way a new place pulls at your limbs, opens you up and sifts through you looking for ways to grow you everywhere. I am glad I am here, glad I am surrounded by such cool people I can't wait to continue getting to know, and glad to be inside a courageously dying season here.

A Very Good Place

I am afraid to write posts lately. I used to do it all the time, and then the wimpish side of me got bigger and I began to get to know lots of different people who might be critical about lots of different aspects of myself. I still haven't gotten over that adolescent stage where you think you are the center of the world and there are eyes of all sorts along your cupboards and walls sizing you up every moment of your life (even when you're alone).

The adolescent still punching around in my veins gets hurt awfully easily. I'm working on that backbone, but I've noticed that in effort to work on my backbone, I've tried to tape up the mouth that is genuinely afraid and worried and doesn't feel quite up to par in most circles.

In effort to approach my growth holistically, I want to take the tape off, and let that mouth speak a little more. So at long last, I have steadied myself in a desk chair by my best window overlooking my festively green and lush backyard and turned my fan to its softest setting to write a post about a few of the feelings Virginia and graduate school have brought me.

This transition has been difficult for me. I feel smaller here than I did in Grand Rapids. I used to enjoy hiding in colorful cafes, smiling brightly over all the new art on the walls and the shops and people walking the messy blooming streets. I used to feel invisible, but in this really important way. Like I had some secret, and lots of joy. I think the secret has to do with possibility. I was in Grand Rapids wondering and wishing and hoping and dreaming and fantasizing about all that might happen in a few months. I wasn't living in reality. I walked around Grand Rapids in dream goggles. Everything smelled sweet because I was expecting sweet just around the corner. And Grand Rapids is beautiful, and the art is luscious, and the cafes are such fun places to hide in journals and books and still be near enough to lots of other people doing the same things.

But the point is that I felt possibility. Now, possibility has arrived. A big fat chunk of it. I mean, I have to fulfill this chunk. I have to write and publish and grow and learn and all of that. But the opportunity came. I am in the place. And the surprising thing is that when I arrived, color seemed to fall out of the atmosphere. Not entirely. My little cottage-y apartment is color-full and feels like home. But my life in general feels a bit more on the gray spectrum.

David told me one night that he thinks this is because my self-worth doesn't come from myself. It comes from the situations or people in my life. The hope of the future gave me a strong feeling of self-worth, but I didn't have any plan for keeping my bright composure after attaining that hope.

A friend of mine commented on me when we were in our early teenage years that I was always bent on growing, on re-inventing myself, on starting fresh toward some new me. A part of me whispers that it is wrong to locate myself in my own possibilities. And perhaps that's true. I cannot define my own worth, I cannot let color drown when I attain or lose a hope or possibility for my life. My worth cannot be dependent upon that.

I need to work on defining my own worth. I need to learn how to cover up the eyes all over my apartment, in the clouds as I walk, and say, "Nobody's watching. Just do as you please." I need to take some joy in my own way of living. I need to take joy in my quirks. I need to press guilt back into it's stoney throat and let myself just be thrilled about watching a Murder Mystery when I could be chugging away at accomplishing this or that.

I love Anne Lamott's words, "Rest and laughter are the most spiritual and subversive acts of all. Laugh, rest, slow down. I recommend that you all take a long deep breath, and stop. Just be where your butts are, and breathe. Take some time. Refuse to cooperate with anyone who is trying to shame you into hopping right back up onto that rat exercise wheel."

I love how spirituality rests on this tenant that there is more to you than what you do and what your skin and swank says about you. I think the big huge sacrifice of living a spiritual life is taking on that lightness and emptying the stones from your pockets.

I think this is the way I'm going to tackle the gray in my life. I'm going to try and live into a new possibility. That I can take joy in myself. That I can sit and paint and write and that no one even needs to know or approve or give me pointers or anything. I can be myself and revel in that. Perhaps that sounds childish, but to me, today, in this new place, it sounds like taking a forkful of chocolate desert. It sounds succulent.

And I need to see this place as a possibility I am still moving into. My writing has possibility. There's this whole shadow over my writing since I got here, as well. I just don't care about it. And I think it's because I don't know where it's going. Now is the time to revise it, to work it out, to strengthen it. And I've never been there with my poems before. It's always just been my own pair of squinty eyes working over the page. Now I've got dozens of others, and they're so smart, and I just don't know what my writing will become, and that unknown stage I'm in is scary and repels me.

The thing is, something will become of it. I'm in this process, now. No getting out. And I will enjoy it. I just need to be vulnerable to it and enjoy it because there is possibility there. There is hope there. My creations are inside an important process. They are not finished, but they have come from a very good place.

To Savor: My Resolution

There is so much (too much) that needs to be written. There's so much that needs mulling, that needs a quiet Saturday afternoon alone in my little city apartment, half lit with afternoon sun, the heat turned temporarily up. I need distance from my life so I can see it clearly, so I can bring it all into focus, and perhaps learn something. I want to be a bird on a branch above my life, watching me work, watching me become so stressed out my stomach twists and turns, my back bones grip and lock. I want to be the bird seeing me so afraid of what people think, of wishing they think I'm pretty, of wishing to be something special in their eyes. I want to gain that distance and sing back to myself some new song that eases my stomach muscles and pulls my shoulders tenderly back into place.

There's a me I've lost lately. When I think of myself, of the person I have been and want to be, I think of something fresh, like the faint citrus scent you catch if you press an orange up to your mouth, the peel still cloaking the fruit. I am vibrant, and never wear dress clothes. I wear skirts, and overalls, and capris, and tank tops and t-shirts. I never smile when I don't mean it, and my eyes have lights that switch on when paint hits the canvas, or a new poetic line catches on the synapses of my brain, or my boyfriend practices guitar and the sound of him working over frets and strings tucks the moment in day blue.

I want the me who relishes in the sound of onions simmering in olive oil, who creates and creates and goes for walks and delights and thinks and reads C.S. Lewis until her brain throbs with thoughts deep and wide as the Mystery that breeds them. I want the me who savors.

Something I've realized recently is that I am not refreshed or truly relaxed by doing nothing. I like to believe that watching marathons of crime television dramas is truly cathartic. I like to believe that television and movies and general provide relaxing entertainment. My weekends are home to these sorts of experiences. And though I love them, they don't provide me with any real rest. I will not be sustained by those moments when I'm back in the grind, dealing with an inconsistent work environment, painstakingly completing graduate school applications, and occasionally allowing the big worries inside to make an even bigger mess in my head.

What does sustain me, what moments I still remember (simple as they were at the time), are moments when I savored something. I remember sitting by myself out on my back porch at my old apartment with all the lights off so I could see the stars, talking to God about the pains and feeling somehow secure in the big dark world with its miniscule glowing markers and tree shadows. I remember dicing peppers, tossing spices, entirely focused on the art of creation.

I savor laying out my tapestry, making a big mess of all my paints and charcoal pencils, ripping up designed paper to collage and paint over. I savor checking up on blogs and websites of those who inspire me to be as tender and loving and hopeful and creative and helpful as possible in this world (lately, maganda.org...who's actually moved...but she has a link you can click to find her new site...I have to do it every time :)). I savor going for walks, writing poems on the walls of my mind as I cross the street, breath deep into every well as I enter the bookstore, heading straight for the poetry section first, celebrating story and the ability to dream up and give words to the sights only you have held.

I savor journaling. I savor blogging. I savor this walk over what my mind has been turning and forgetting and stomping under all the stress and clutching and gripping. I savor thinking about my boyfriend and what we are beginning together. I savor the image of him, shaggy hair, jeans with giant holes in the knees. I love coming back to the realization that I have never felt so lucky as I do now.

So, here's to 2011. May it be a year of savoring. And it will be some work, as odd as that sounds. It is most difficult for me to take time to enjoy. And there is time--not much--but there is. There are long enough moments for taking in sights, for going slower, for returning to being a simple human being with one life that is going, moving, now. I'm starting now, writing what I love to write, here, for whoever reads it. May you find time to savor, and be filled and refreshed and sustained.