And lastly in regard of any one,

five-sense Friday

2012-01-27T10:19:00.002-07:00

This week I've been...

hearing: dissertation

smelling: dissertation

tasting: dissertation

seeing: dissertation

feeling: dissertation

But really, it's been an intense week. My goal was to have the thing finished and mailed off by Tuesday, and I met that goal. I didn't pull any all-nighters, either. You'd think a two-year project would leave plenty of time for tweaking at the end, but the impossibility of ever really summing it up, doing it justice, left me writing and rewriting the introduction and the conclusion until the very end. Thank goodness for deadlines, really. Honestly, the moment I set the defense date (and knew the manuscript was due a month before that date), I felt a mingled sense of panic and immense relief. Knowing that I was working within certain concrete limitations gave me a sense of real freedom. It couldn't be perfect. It needed to be as good as it could be within those limitations.

I printed a copy on Tuesday (see above) and walked it to the post office with pride and mailed it off. I talked to my baby brother on the way there and my mom on the way back. The snow was melting and slushy underfoot, and the sky cleared up to a gorgeous blue as I walked. It weighed more than three and a half pounds, that pile of pages representing two years of my life. Walking out of the post office after sending it off I felt strangely bereft. I walked home and made myself a cup of tea.

Since then I have been formatting to grad school standards for printing and binding, cleaning my apartment, printing and mailing more copies for other committee members (after buying more paper and ink!), walking to the library, walking to the hardware store, reading Silence, cooking proper dinners, communicating with schools about interviews, dreaming of possible futures. Josh and I watched Wild Target. We played Boggle. This life of leisure, I'm not sure what to make of it. I think I'll probably mop the floors today. Tomorrow we might go out for coffee and pastries.

Five-Sense Friday

2012-01-20T09:21:00.000-07:00

Today I'm....

hearing: the voice of a dear friend on the phone while I put on my socks; Sufjan Stevens ("For the Widows in Paradise, for the Fatherless in Ypsilanti"--I grew up going to church in Ypsi)

smelling: coffee; soap; cold

tasting: coffee

feeling: like I should probably eat some food, too, to avoid the caffeine/nerve shakes that chase me around in this strange season of life; slight anxiety about looming deadlines but also quietly confident in the work I am doing; so thankful for a soft brown sweater on my arms

seeing: the mess of my work area (a desk, a floor, an ironing board covered in books and folders and notes); the brightness of my screen; the bare trees outside my window stretching up toward a rippling blue-cloud-blue sky

On Finishing a Dissertation

2012-01-16T17:40:00.002-07:00

Represent.

Attend.

Risk.

A splash of gold on the horizon, a fading of light, a darkness of tree silhouettes and smoke rising from neighbors' woodstoves: the sky shading to a blue so pure and honest it hurts the eyes to look at it as I crane my neck to see as high up as I can: this is an evening, this evening, the evening I am living in. I am living it in a pool of warm lamplight, with a cup of Earl Grey, with a desk and floor and ironing board covered in books and papers, sticky notes and index cards, with a scarf around my neck sent from the midwest and my mother's knitting needles.

I am trying to finish a dissertation. It is a dissertation about women's literary engagement with suffering and self-sacrifice, with the question of redemption. It is a dissertation about attention, representation, and risk. How ought we to read? How ought we to read suffering, the suffering that marks texts and the suffering that marks bodies? How ought we to understand representations of suffering, and represent it ourselves, and represent something better? What risks does such a practice of ethics require? What sufferings do we risk, ourselves, in the pursuit of suffering's end?

We risk pain. We risk being wrong. We risk failing.

We risk assassination and being remembered in tidy, memorable sound bytes rather than for our challenge to the status quo (I am thinking today, too, of Martin Luther King, Jr.).

We risk being misrepresented, misunderstood, maligned (I am thinking of Occupy movements).

But oh, the good I have read again and again in the act of risking the self: what good in making that inevitable and terrifying leap.

Five-Sense Friday

2012-01-13T10:40:00.002-07:00

I'm back from a week in Seattle and its environs, seeking to live into the cold present of Montana. When I returned, all the Christmas decorations were still up, since I was gone for the last two days of Christmas and for Epiphany and for Macedonian Christmas. Josh and I celebrated and then, yesterday, I put all the decorations away.

And today is Friday. Now, and here, I am...

smelling: the cold air and meager snow when I went outside this morning; steam from my hot black tea; peppermint hand soap and fir-tree dish soap and hand lotion that smells like lemon Pez candy

tasting: store-brand cheerios with banana; milky black tea; later on, salad and pizza and doutbless an apple or two

hearing: the hum of my laptop; the occasional whoosh of a car driving by; the strange quiet after eight days full of crowds and people

seeing: Rocky Mountain horizons again; fake tree needles all over the carpet; piles of laundry waiting for folding; piles of notes and drafts waiting for completion

feeling: warm mug between my palms; warm sweater on my arms; warm socks over my toes; the pressure of a deadline and the hope of the day after that

Five-Sense Friday

2011-12-30T11:27:00.002-07:00

And here we are again. These are heady days, full of ideas and hopes and anxieties and dreams. Amidst it all, I have been...

seeing: the shining, colorful lights bedecking our Christmas tree, put up on Christmas Eve and glowing through to Epiphany; hundreds of pages of dissertation notes representing thousands and thousands of pages of reading; my face in a salon mirror, suddenly framed by a modern bob, and inches of soft hair on the floor around me

hearing: J's Christmas playlist, finally on repeat after a month of the Advent playlist; the quiet of an apartment where I do my Work, alone; dear voices on the telephone

smelling: roasting vegetables; fake pine to help trick us into believing the tree is real; the sweet steam of chai rising to my face as I take a sip

tasting: pizza, and roasted butternut squash with feta, and endless cups of tea, and more ramen noodle lunches than I care to admit (I do add frozen vegetables -- some nutritional value there, right?), plus chocolate from stockings

feeling: the tension humming through my body that signifies possibility and transition, excitement and fear, as I prepare to visit a new city, to present at an intimidating conference, to meet with potential colleagues, to wear my suits and stockings with confidence, to speak my piece with all the honest joy and interest I possess

Third Day of Christmas

2011-12-27T13:34:00.004-07:00

We are living into Christmastide this year, though of course it is shaped by the reality of work and the tasks of living: Josh's schedule this week swings from 8-5 shifts to 12-9 shifts, and so far today I have not only sat in quiet contemplation but also scheduled appointments, paid all the bills, argued with my insurance company, and hung a load of wet laundry to dry. I have work to do this afternoon, writing to a deadline, and I struggle to quiet myself and find the pace of thinking that such work requires.

I am unsettled by thinking about Christmas's twelve days, about the stretch that carries us from Christmas, the celebration of a Messiah's birth, to Epiphany or Three King's Day, the celebration of the arrival and worshipful giving of those traveling magi guided by a star. Yesterday, the 26th (or in Orthodox countries today, the 27th) is St. Stephen's Day: just after Christmas, we honor the first person martyred for preaching the Good News. Tomorrow, the 28th, is the Feast of the Innocents, when we remember those Jewish babes killed in Jesus's hometown because a politician couldn't take the threat of a usurper: because power so gripped him that he thought it necessary to murder still-nursing boys.

Our religious Christmas celebrations are often sentimental, glowy cooing over a precious baby who doesn't make a peep (Sarah Styles Bessey offers a beautiful contemplation on an alternative view of the incarnation). But I sometimes wonder, how much water did Mary have to clean that little newborn, and was it warm? How long did it take for that infant to realize he was a fugitive? I do think the sentimental, idyllically-lit images of baby Jesus serve a purpose: they remind us of the paradox of an all-powerful God manifested in a tiny human being, the sort of human being many of us have an inexplicable and elemental urge to coo at and cuddle. This is a great mystery, and a beautiful one.

But the church holidays that follow Christmas Day, that take their place within the twelve days that extend the celebration of the Word's arrival on earth in flesh and bone, are hard to render glowingly precious. We celebrate Stephen, that preacher stoned for his counter-cultural message. And we remember those babies, whose death was the result of human lust for power and control, of a political ruler whose interest in maintaining his own system made him think nothing of ordering the deaths of infants from minority families oppressed by Roman rule. The horror of these stories--of martyrdom, of babies as political casualties--reminds us of the reasons Jesus came: to bring life, to show another way beyond frantic self-interest, to break the cycle of violence and death.

I wonder sometimes, looking at the world around me on dark winter days, how long the violence and death will continue: I wonder as I see similar cases, literal and figurative martyrs for unpopular causes, Middle-Eastern babes killed "accidentally" in wars that have a great deal to do with political power and self-interest. I sit on this third day of Christmas with my tea gone cold and my head throbbing, skimming the headlines, wondering at tales of weeping mothers.

And then I am confronted with the radical nature of redemption, the way forgiveness and total change comes at times even to those who in my stilted vision of justice and mercy I don't want to see forgiven or changed, not if I'm honest. For who held the coats of the men who stoned Stephen, doubtless egging them on? Who stood by and celebrated the death of that martyr?

It was Saul who held those coats, who hated Christians, who hunted them down. It was Saul who was confronted with the grace of God so powerful that he left everything to change his tune and even his name. It was Saul, renamed Paul, who penned those words in his pastoral letter to the Corinthians: love never fails.

Advent 4.5

2011-12-22T17:13:00.002-07:00

From just the right angle, and when the front tree has shaken off its leaves, I can see the southern end of the Bridger mountain range from the living room window. This evening, the snow-streaked peaks have a rosy hue, borrowed from the sun that sets on the other side of the Gallatin Valley. I am sitting on the corner of the couch that gives me this view, taking it in, wondering what stories those moutains hold, what glories the reflected sun has wrought on them during days and years and centuries I have not been around to witness.

I am thinking about the promise made to David (a humble shepherd plucked from the fields to become a king), recorded in this week's Old Testament reading and alluded to in the angel's words to Mary (a humble peasant woman plucked from the masses to become the mother of God): a kingdom, forever. This promise is a huge one. Looking out over the mountains, even, tall and solid and glowing, I have a hard time imagining "forever."

But then, the angel says to Mary, God keeps promises. God keeps the promise for an eternal kingdom, the promise that a virgin will conceive, the promise that dear elderly Elizabeth will bear a precious child of her own. "No word from God will ever fail."

(we interrupt this Advent blogging...)

2011-12-21T16:25:00.002-07:00

But then again, it is Advent blogging. Today, the shortest day of the year, the Solstice day, I left the twinkle lights on all day. Josh turned them on before I got out of bed, and usually I turn them off as the morning light shifts into the apartment, then turn them on again as dusk sneaks over everything, but today I let them shine. We had snow this morning, and clouds through much of the day, and twinkle lights seemed just right.

I am sitting in their glow, on the floor, surrounded by books and pens and cups and papers. I am trying to write a dissertation conclusion. I am having a very hard time.

I think it is partly because to write the conclusion is, in one way, to admit that the project that occupied me for a year and a half has come to its end. (I still have revisions, and--heaven help us--formatting, but the conclusion is like a definitive period, like a solid answer to the questions I've spent 18 months posing every day.) I think the difficulty also comes from the fact that the ideas form themselves in the writing, that I don't have a formulated final statement to make until I discover it in the labor of scrawling or typing it into existence. I wonder what I will say. I wonder how it will end.

I am learning this lesson in my solitary day of (not) writing: We struggle towards completion, stretch ourselves into the next thing, into the culmination. This is a message of Advent: we wait and we prepare. We sit, silent, and we act. We leave the lights on, to remind us of the good to come.

Advent 4.4

2011-12-21T08:11:00.001-07:00

In the sixth month of Elizabeth's pregnancy, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee, to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David. The virgin's name was Mary. The angel went to her and said, "Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you."

Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be. But the angel said to her, "Do not be afraid, Mary, you have found favor with God. You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever; his kingdom will never end."

"How will this be," Mary asked the angel, "since I am a virgin?"

The angel answered, "The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God. Even Elizabeth your relative is going to have a child in her old age, and she who was said to be unable to conceive is in her sixth month. For no word from God will ever fail."

"I am the Lord's servant," Mary answered. "May it be to be according to your word." Then the angel left her.

Luke 1.26-38 (TNIV)

Advent 4.3

2011-12-20T10:50:00.001-07:00

Now to him who is able to establish you in accordance with my gospel,

the message I proclaim about Jesus Christ,

in keeping with the revelation of the mystery hidden for long ages past,

but now revealed and made known through the prophetic writings

by the command of the eternal God,

so that all the Gentiles might come to faith and obedience--

to the only wise God be glory forever through Jesus Christ!

Amen.

Romans 16.25-27 (TNIV)

Advent 4.2

2011-12-19T16:37:00.000-07:00

And Mary said:

“My soul glorifies the Lord
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,

for he has been mindful
   of the humble state of his servant.
From now on all generations will call me blessed,
  for the Mighty One has done great things for me—
   holy is his name.
His mercy extends to those who fear him,
   from generation to generation.
He has performed mighty deeds with his arm;
   he has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts.
He has brought down rulers from their thrones
   but has lifted up the humble.
He has filled the hungry with good things
   but has sent the rich away empty.
He has helped his servant Israel,
   remembering to be merciful
to Abraham and his descendants forever,
   just as he promised our ancestors.”

Luke 1.46-55 (TNIV)

Advent 4.1

2011-12-19T16:30:00.000-07:00

After the king was settled in his palace and the LORD had given him rest from all his enemies around him, he said to Nathan the prophet, “Here I am, living in a house of cedar, while the ark of God remains in a tent.”

Nathan replied to the king, “Whatever you have in mind, go ahead and do it, for the LORD is with you.”

But that night the word of the LORD came to Nathan, saying:

“Go and tell my servant David, ‘This is what the LORD says: Are you the one to build me a house to dwell in? ⁶ I have not dwelt in a house from the day I brought the Israelites up out of Egypt to this day. I have been moving from place to place with a tent as my dwelling. Wherever I have moved with all the Israelites, did I ever say to any of their rulers whom I commanded to shepherd my people Israel, “Why have you not built me a house of cedar?”’

“Now then, tell my servant David, ‘This is what the LORD Almighty says: I took you from the pasture, from tending the flock, and appointed you ruler over my people Israel. I have been with you wherever you have gone, and I have cut off all your enemies from before you. Now I will make your name great, like the names of the greatest men on earth. And I will provide a place for my people Israel and will plant them so that they can have a home of their own and no longer be disturbed. Wicked people will not oppress them anymore, as they did at the beginning and have done ever since the time I appointed leaders over my people Israel. I will also give you rest from all your enemies.

"Your house and your kingdom will endure forever before me; your throne will be established forever.’”

2 Samuel 7.1-11, 16

Advent 3.7

2011-12-17T08:22:00.003-07:00

Source: Orthodox Icons

There was a man send from God whose name was John.
He came as a witness to testify concerning that light, so that through him all might believe.
He himself was not the light; he only came as a witness to the light.

What does it mean to witness to the light?

Advent 3.6

2011-12-16T09:49:00.000-07:00

The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is on me,

because the LORD has anointed me

to proclaim good news to the poor.

He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,

to proclaim freedom for the captives

and release from darkness for the prisoners,

to proclaim the year of the LORD's favor

and the day of vengeance of our God,

to comfort all who mourn,

and provide for those who grieve in Zion--

to bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes,

the oil of joy instead of mourning

and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair.

They will be called mighty oaks,

a planting of the LORD

for the display of his splendor.

Photo credit: Dad

Discuss.

Advent 3.5

2011-12-15T07:26:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, Saint Lucia's Day, was dark and rainy here in southeast Michigan, but we spent several hours of it wandering the Detroit Institute of Arts. We saw the suits of armor in the grand hallway, a history of American art, ancient clay bowls and mysterious statues, but we were there in particular for a special exhibition on Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus. The exhibition, which gathers Rembrandt's work from all around the world, from sites as distinct as Bob Jones University and the Louvre, explores how Rembrandt's artistic representations of Jesus changed over his lifetime, particularly with his experience living in a Jewish neighborhood in Amsterdam. The curators also do a wonderful job of showing Rembrandt's developing religious artistry, posting drawings and paintings of similar subjects from different points in his career side by side, decking the walls with quotes by contemporaries about cosmopolitanism and religious life in Amsterdam, and including large-scale representations of excerpts from the Bible translation (and Calvinist commentary) Rembrandt would have had as a source for his biblical scenes.

I love museums, and the exhibition itself was gorgeous. Walking through an art museum always feels a bit holy to me, maybe because it holds so many examples of human attempts at making meaning or stretching toward the mysterious, maybe because it protects so many ancient religious relics, maybe because its architecture emphasizes its status as a place set apart. Museums often get me to thinking, open up the space in me for pondering even in the middle of a busy season of life.

This is what I have been thinking since the Rembrandt exhibition: how does the face of Jesus change for me, over a lifetime? (Or for you, dear reader?) Rembrandt went from imagining Jesus as a white, European ideal of beauty to seeing him in the face of his Jewish neighbors; his art seems to have shown a development away from representing Jesus's holiness as just shining light and difference from everyone else to also representing his compassion in portraits where he looks out at the reader, his eyes kind and steady.

The first passage of this week's Advent readings, the one from Isaiah 61, relates to my thinking here. For much of my life the story of Jesus I heard was a story that didn't have much to do with his life, except that he was categorically perfect, "spotless" or "sinless." This image of Jesus was of him as a substituting sacrifice, like a lamb, who was "born to die." The good news he brought was that he came to earth as God's perfect son to take on the punishment for human sin by dying on the cross, then rising again, and that if we trusted in him we could be saved forever.

I still believe this is true, somehow, in the mysterious narrative of redemption. But I have also realized that this is not the only image of Jesus the Bible gives us. Just like Rembrandt for much of his life missed out on the fact that Jesus was a Jew, and that the Jewish people his culture derided or mistrusted were in fact beautiful representatives of Jesus, I missed out (and I believe a huge swath of contemporary Christianity misses out) on the richness of the person of Jesus. When we focus exclusively on the fact that he lived, died, and lived again (and often even the resurrection is left out of this picture), we forget about the biblical stories of not just what he was (a sacrifice, a redeemer) but also who he was (his character, his actions, his teachings).

A story that challenged me to change my image of Jesus is the one in Luke 4, where after being tested in the wilderness, Jesus goes to Nazareth and reads from the scroll, from Isaiah, quoting this week's passage from Isaiah 61 as well as a bit of chapter 58: "The spirit of the Lord is on me / because he has anointed me / to proclaim good news to the poor. / He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners / and recovery of sight for the blind, / to set the oppressed free, / to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." At one point I believed Jesus was speaking just spiritually here: he was proclaiming good news to the spiritually impoverished, to the spiritually imprisoned, to the spiritually blind and oppressed. But then I read about his historical context, and began to realize that Jesus was often speaking to people who were literally, economically poor, literally imprisoned and oppressed by the Roman empire. He was speaking to people who were literally blind and ill. And along with going around teaching radically counter-cultural lessons of humility and simplicity and trust in God, Jesus in his lifetime went around literally healing people's literal blindness and illness and oppressions. Jesus's work in his lifetime was both material and spiritual, and he refused any easy distinction between the two.

I began to see Jesus not just as a born-to-die savior whose miracles and strange teachings functioned just to prove the point that he was God, but as a self-emptying God-made-person whose life, his teachings and actions, were just as important as his death, not to mention his miraculous triumph over death in the resurrection. The stories of Jesus's life collected in the Gospels show us a colorful, challenging picture of who God is. My image of Jesus began to shift from seeing him as a shadowy being who "paid it all" to also seeing him as one who has shown a way for us to follow through the pains and complexities of real human life, by the sanctifying power of the Spirit. The Good News of Isaiah 61, which Jesus quotes, is not a formula for getting out of hell. It is good news of hope, of comfort, of healing, of rebuilding, and as Jesus boldly asserted to his listeners in Nazareth, "Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing."

"I am the way," Jesus said, and I often hear it quoted. But instead of sitting back and nodding my head and feeling secure in my tiny picture of Jesus, it seems to me that the follow-up questions (also quoted from Jesus) must always be:

"Who do people say I am?"

"Who do you say I am?"

Advent 3.4

2011-12-14T07:17:00.003-07:00

Photo credit: Dad

There was a man send from God whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify concerning that light, so that through him all might believe. He himself was not the light; he only came as a witness to the light.

Now this was John's testimony when the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem sent priests and Levites to ask him who he was. He did not fail to confess, but confessed freely, "I am not the Messiah."

They asked him, "Then who are you? Are you Elijah?"

He said, "I am not."

"Are you the Prophet?"

He answered, "No."

Finally they said, " Who are you? Give us an answer to take back to those who sent us. What do you say about yourself?"

John replied in the words of Isaiah the prophet, "I am the voice of one calling in the wilderness, 'Make straight the way for the Lord.'"

Now the Pharisees who had been sent questioned him, "Why then do you baptize if you are not the Messiah, nor Elijah, nor the Prophet?"

"I baptize with water," John replied, "but among you stands one you do now know. He is the one who comes after me, the thongs of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie."

This all happened at Bethany on the other side of the Jordan, where John was baptizing.

John 1.6-8, 19-28 (TNIV)

Advent 3.3

2011-12-13T14:09:00.003-07:00

Photo Credit: Dad

Rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus.

Do not put out the Spirit's fire. Do not treat prophecies with contempt but test them all; hold on to what is good, reject whatever is harmful.

May God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through. May your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. The one who calls you is faithful, and he will do it.

I Thessalonians 5.16-24 (TNIV)

Advent 3.2

2011-12-12T15:52:00.001-07:00

Photo credit: Dad

When the LORD restored the fortunes of Zion,

we were like those who dreamed.

Our mouths were filled with laughter,

our tongues with songs of joy.

Then it was said among the nations,

"The LORD has done great things for them."

The LORD has done great things for us,

and we are filled with joy.

Restore our fortunes, LORD,

like streams in the Negev.

Those who sow with tears

will reap with songs of joy.

Those who go out weeping,

carrying seed to sow,

will return with songs of joy,

carrying sheaves with them.

Psalm 126 (TNIV)

Advent 3.1

2011-12-11T06:48:00.001-07:00

The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is on me,

because the LORD has anointed me

to proclaim good news to the poor.

He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,

to proclaim freedom for the captives

and release from darkness for the prisoners,

to proclaim the year of the LORD's favor

and the day of vengeance of our God,

to comfort all who mourn,

and provide for those who grieve in Zion--

to bestow on them a crown of beauty

instead of ashes,

the oil of joy

instead of mourning

and a garment of praise

instead of a spirit of despair.

They will be called mighty oaks,

a planting of the LORD

for the display of his splendor.

They will rebuild the ancient ruins

and restore the places long devastated;

they will renew the ruined cities

that have been devastated for generations.

"For I, the LORD, love justice;

I hate robbery and wrongdoing.

In my faithfulness I will reward my people

and make an everlasting covenant with them.

Their descendants will be known among the nations

and their offspring among the peoples.

All who see them will acknowledge

that they are a people the LORD has blessed."

I delight greatly in the LORD;

my soul rejoices in my God.

For he has clothed me with garments of salvation

and arrayed me in a robe of his righteousness,

as a bridegroom adorns his head like a priest,

and as a bride adorns herself with her jewels.

For as the soil makes the sprout come up

and a garden causes seeds to grow,

so the Sovereign LORD will make righteousness

and praise spring up before all nations.

Advent 2.7

2011-12-10T08:00:00.000-07:00

I'm traveling today, so it's your turn! Reading and re-reading the selections for this week, I have been struck by the themes of comfort and time. How do these themes strike you in the passages? Or do other aspects resonate with you?

Do any particular songs, poems, or images symbolize comfort, time, or another relevant theme for you? I'd love for you to post links that I could then compile into a multi-media collage next week...

Advent 2.6

2011-12-09T11:25:00.000-07:00

In light of yesterday's reflection on how we are living...

[AC] Promo 2011 from Advent Conspiracy on Vimeo.

Advent 2.5

2011-12-08T08:54:00.001-07:00

I awoke this morning to fog: the hill across the way is a dark haze behind the thick white air, and the mountains are invisible on the horizon. The world feels quiet, padded all around with cotton or wool. I imagine that I am wrapped in a sky-quilt, here in this apartment silent and still but for the noise of my typing.

I do not understand Montana winter fog. I read that it is 19 degrees outside, ten degrees warmer than it was in the night. In such cold, does snow evaporate because it is homesick for the sky?

I am not homesick for the sky, but perhaps for a new heaven and a new earth, one where love and faithfulness meet together, where righteousness and peace kiss each other. And here is the challenge, for myself and perhaps for you: in light of that homesickness, how am I living? Too often, I feel, I go about in a fog, seeking to distract myself from the horrors of war and global poverty and rampant injustice, and from the closer-to-home sorrows of physical pain and dreams deferred.

This is my challenge for myself today: Do I live in hope, in active hope? Do my habits and projects and words and dreams draw from and manifest this hope? Am I acting, here and now, with the perseverance and joy of one who believes in something better up ahead?

Advent 2.4

2011-12-07T08:57:00.001-07:00

Photo credit: Dad

The beginning of the good news about Jesus the Messiah, as it is written in Isaiah the prophet:

     "I will send my messenger ahead of you,
          who will prepare your way"--
     "a voice of one calling in the wilderness,
     'Prepare the way for the Lord,
          make straight paths for him.'"

And so John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. The whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem went out to him. Confessing their sins, they were baptized by him in the Jordan River. John wore clothing made of camel's hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. And this was his message: "After me comes the one more powerful than I, the thongs of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down to untie. I baptize you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit."

Mark 1.1-8 (TNIV)

Advent 2.3

2011-12-06T11:06:00.001-07:00

Photo Credit: Dad

But do not forget this one thing, dear friends:
                                                                     With the Lord a day is like a thousand years,
                                                                             and a thousand years are like a day.
       The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness.
                                     Instead he is patient with you,
                                                      not wanting anyone to perish,
                                                                            but everyone to come to repentance.

But the day of the Lord will come like a thief.
                   The heavens will disappear with a roar;
                   the elements will be destroyed by fire,
                   and the earth and everything done in it will be laid bare.

Since everything will be destroyed in this way, what kind of people ought you to be?
                        You ought to live holy and godly lives
                        as you look forward to the day of God and speed its coming.
                                             That day will bring about the destruction of the heavens by fire,
                                             and the elements will melt in the heat.
                                             But in keeping wit his promise we are looking forward
                                                         to a new heaven and a new earth, where righteousness dwells.

So then, dear friends, since you are looking forward to this,
                 make every effort to be found spotless, blameless and at peace with him.
                                   Bear in mind that our Lord's patience means salvation.

                                                                                            2 Peter 3.8-15a (TNIV)

Advent 2.2

2011-12-05T09:53:00.001-07:00

You, LORD, showed favor to your land;

you restored the fortunes of Jacob.

You forgave the iniquity of your people

and covered all of their sins.

I will listen to what God the LORD says;

he promises peace to his people, his faithful servants--

but let them not turn to folly.

Surely his salvation is near those who fear him,

that his glory may dwell in our land.

Love and faithfulness meet together;

righteousness and peace kiss each other.

Faithfulness springs forth from the earth,

and righteousness looks down from heaven.

The LORD will indeed give what is good,

and our land will yield its harvest.

Righteousness goes before him

and prepares the way for his steps.

Psalm 85.1-2, 8-13 (TNIV)

Advent 2.1

2011-12-04T16:50:00.001-07:00

Comfort, comfort my people,

says your God.

Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,

and proclaim to her

that her hard service has been completed,

that her sin has been paid for,

that she has received from the LORD's hand

double for all her sins.

A voice of one calling:

"In the wilderness prepare the way for the LORD;

make straight in the desert a highway for our God.

Every valley shall be raised up,

every mountain and hill made low;

the rough ground shall become level,

the rugged places a plain.

And the glory of the LORD will be revealed,

and all people will see it together.

For the mouth of the LORD has spoken."

A voice says, "Cry out."

And I said, "What shall I cry?"

"All people are like grass,

and all human faithfulness is like the flowers of the field.

The grass withers and the flowers fall,

because the breath of the LORD blows on them.

Surely the people are grass.

The grass withers and the flowers fall,

but the word of our God endures forever."

You who bring good news to Zion,

go up on a high mountain.

You who bring good news to Jerusalem,

lift up your voice with a shout,

lift it up, do not be afraid;

say to the towns of Judah,

"Here is your God!"

See, the Sovereign LORD comes with power,

and his arm rules for him.

See, his reward is with him,

and his recompense accompanies him.

He tends his flock like a shepherd:

He gathers the lambs in his arms

and carries them close to his heart;

he gently leads those that have young.

Isaiah 40.1-11 (TNIV)

Advent 1.7

2011-12-03T10:31:00.000-07:00

"There is also great comfort for me, as I age,

in reminding myself that I am leaves blown on the wind, or grass.

In this life I am temporary & fragile, & that is a blessing.

I need not try to shoulder the work of a mountain, or a boulder.

Only God is a Rock."

-Ruth G

Only God is a Rock, writes a dear friend, and I read it as I sit imagining myself as a leaf blown away, or drinking tears by the bowlful, eating bread salty with weeping. The Psalmnist blames God for these sorrows, but I do not. I blame the powers of darkness and death. I blame those forces as I eat my morning toast, and drink my morning tea, and tidy my untidy apartment, and rub my aching muscles.

What I ask of God, whom I trust to be a rock--like the mountains on every horizon that hem me in as I live in this valley, dark blue, frosted white, angular and strong--I ask with the writer of Isaiah: "Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down, / That the mountains would tremble before you!" Which is to say: I trust you, mysterious Most High, as good and strong, as healer and redeemer. I trust that in the face of your might and comfort, even the embrace of these surrounding mountains seems a paltry thing. I trust you to come, and make things right: I ask for this.

"Advent," I read in the Oxford English Dictionary, is from the Latin for arrival, or the verb "to come." For nearly a thousand years, "Advent" in English has meant the festival that precedes celebration of Christ's birth. But the meaning is more layered, for as early as the fifteenth century, according to the dear OED, "Advent" has also referred more broadly to the Incarnation, so that it has also taken on the meaning of the coming or arrival of an Incarnate Christ a second time--the "Second Advent," or "Second Coming" about which Christians so like to debate. This Second coming is the one about which we read in the week's New Testament selections. In the church festival of Advent, we re-enact our waiting for that First Arrival, in part to express our joy and longing for the Second Arrival: Christ has come; Christ will come. We are waiting, drinking our bowls of tears and eating our salty bread, clinging to the hope of something else.

And yet--the dictionary also tells me that Advent has a third meaning rooted in its broader sense of the Incarnation, and that for five hundred years it has also referred in a way to the arrival or coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. After ever so long, a Messiah arrived: and he lived a life and died a death and then rose again in a narrative that confused most people's expectations and continues to confuse. (I believe these mysteries, which in today's world seems a little crazy: that God became a person, born of a woman; that Jesus was absolutely dead and then absolutely alive. I stand in a community that believes these things, realizing that we all seem a little off our rockers. I stand in a great cloud of witnesses who believe in mystery and life out of death.) But at the end of the story of Jesus's earthly life, he does go away. He goes away, leaving confused and frightened followers, but he has made a promise: He has promised another Comforter.

As the story tells us, on the day of Pentecost the Holy Spirit arrived--another Advent--and filled the body of Christ (Jesus's remaining, breathing and acting presence on the earth, the church) with gifts: gifts for speaking and ministering, for loving and teaching, for caring and wisdom. Here is another mystery: God in us? This is the mystery and hope referred to by Paul in this week's passage from 1 Corinthians. As we wait for the fullness of Christ's next Advent, we are surrounded and infused with the Comfort of God's Spirit within us. We live into the story of the coming of God Incarnate; we live steeped in the mysterious presence of God as Spirit; we wait for the ultimate comfort of a Justly Merciful and Mercifully Just Ruler and Healer.

I believe Jesus drank the bowl of tears and ate the salty bread in his death, down to the last drop and morsel, and in his death and resurrection triumphed over the powers of death and suffering. But sometimes, in this life, the wine and bread of Communion taste like salt and sawdust on my tongue. The Comforter has come, to strengthen us through these meals of sorrow. Twice, the world has waited, and twice the promised Advent has been fulfilled.

We wait for the third: for the Coming, for the feast, when the bowls of tears will be smashed, and the bread of weeping fall to pieces, and the table will be set with cups filled to the brim and running over, and bread sweet and warm and dripping with honey.

Even so come, Lord Jesus.

Advent 1.6

2011-12-02T11:16:00.001-07:00

Waiting

I am waiting.
On benches, at the corners
of earth's waitingrooms,
by trees whose sap rises, rises
to escape in gray leaves and lose
itself in the last air.
Waiting
for who comes at last,
late, lost, the forever
longed-for, walking
not my road but crossing
the corner where I wait.

(Denise Levertov. Relearning the Alphabet. New York: New Directions, 1970. 47.)

Advent 1.5

2011-12-01T12:28:00.001-07:00

Reading through this past Sunday's scriptures passages again and again this week, I am struck by their disparate and repeating images: the sky, the clouds, the wind; God as restorer, God as judge, God as parent, God as shepherd, God as potter. Of course, then, there is also the theme of longing, the theme of waiting.

Today I have been especially thinking about images of the seasons in this week's readings. The Isaiah passage refers to fall, to winter, when it speaks of the shriveling of leaves that are then blown away. We are those leaves, in the metaphor, and our brokenness is the wind that carries us away. In this image we are vulnerable, living fragile lives toward death. It seems appropriate to me to read this passage at this time of year (at least in this climate), as the last leaves fall from the trees, crunch underfoot, swirl in gusts of frozen wind, and are finally buried under snow. The days are short, the gardens dormant, the oaks bare.

But the Gospel reading speaks of the fig tree's budding, evidence of spring and summer, evidence of life. Jesus gives his listeners the picture of the tree's tender twigs and unfurling leaves as foretaste of a new season, encouraging them to watch for such indications of his coming, with light and life. I know that feeling, the feeling at the end of a winter that seems endless, when the trees' tangled branches stand stark against the empty sky, when the taste of fresh-grown things or the scent of sun-warmed soil is so faint a memory I question its truth. That longing is familiar to my soul. Suddenly, one day, the front maple is ever-so-subtly hazed with green at the tips, and while it happens just this way every year, every year I am astonished and weepy with relief.

The coniferous tree is the one we usually associate with Christmas; the evergreen's vibrant branches almost miraculously signify life in a time of dormancy and death. I love this image. But this week's readings have me thinking that deciduous trees are perhaps more true to the story of our waiting: their cycle of life and death, their vulnerability to the changing seasons, their apparent total loss of growth in the fall and winter that is followed, again and again, by the surprise of green buds that open themselves to the sun and signify life again--this narrative is ours. Our branches do not always boast green. We have barren times, empty times, wind-blown times. And yet.

We are living in a season of death. But we are watching, waiting for a season of life.

Advent 1.4

2011-11-30T09:25:00.001-07:00

[And Jesus said], "But in those days, following that distress,

"'the sun will be darkened,
and the moon will not give its light;
the stars will fall from the sky,
and the heavenly bodies will be shaken.'

"At that time people will see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory. And he will send his angels and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of the heavens.

"Now learn this lesson from the fig tree: As soon as its twigs get tender and its leaves come out, you know that summer is near. Even so, when you see these things happening, you know that it is near, right at the door. Truly I tell you, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away.

"But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. Be on guard! Be alert! You do not know when that time will come. It's like a man going away: He leaves his house and puts his servants in charge, each with an assigned task, and tells the one at the door to keep watch.

"Therefore keep watch because you do not know when the owner of the house will come back--whether in the evening, or at midnight, or when the rooster crows, or at dawn. If he comes suddenly, do not let him find you sleeping. What I say to you, I say to everyone: 'Watch!'"

Mark 13.24-37 (TNIV)

Advent 1.3

2011-11-29T09:57:00.001-07:00

Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

I always thank my God for you

because of his grace given you in Christ Jesus.

For in him you have been enriched in every way

--with all kinds of speech and with all knowledge--

God thus confirming our testimony about Christ among you.

Therefore you do not lack any spiritual gift

as you eagerly wait for our Lord Jesus Christ to be revealed.

He will also keep you firm to the end,

so that you will be blameless

on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.

God is faithful,

who has called you into fellowship with his Son,

Jesus Christ our Lord.

I Corinthians 1.3-9 (TNIV)

Advent 1.2

2011-11-28T11:56:00.001-07:00

Hear us, Shepherd of Israel,

you who lead Joseph like a flock.

You who sit enthroned between the cherubim,

shine forth before Ephraim, Benjamin, and Manasseh.

Awaken your might;

come and save us.

Restore us, O God;

make your face shine on us,

that we may be saved.

How long, LORD God Almighty,

will you anger smolder against the prayers of your people?

You have fed them with the bread of tears;

you have made them drink tears by the bowlful.

You have made us an object of derision to our enemies,

and our enemies mock us.

Restore us, God Almighty;

make your face shine on us,

that we may be saved.

Let your hand rest on the man at your right hand,

the son of man you have raised up for yourself.

Then we will not turn away from you;

revive us, and we will call on your name.

Restore us, LORD God Almighty;

make your face shine on us,

that we may be saved.

Psalm 80.1-7, 17-19 (TNIV)

Advent 1.1

2011-11-27T17:29:00.001-07:00

Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down,

that the mountains would tremble before you!

As when fire sets twigs ablaze and causes water to boil,

come down to make your name known to your enemies

and cause the nations to quake before you!

For when you did awesome things that we did not expect,

you came down, and the mountains trembled before you.

Since ancient times no one has heard,

no ear has perceived,

no eye has seen any God besides you,

who acts on behalf of those who wait for him.

You come to the help of those who gladly do right,

who remember your ways.

But when we continued to sin against them,

you were angry.

How then can we be saved?

All of us have become like one who is unclean,

and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags;

we all shrivel up like leaf,

and like the wind our sins sweep us away.

No one calls on your name

or strives to lay hold of you;

for you have hidden your face from us

and have given us over to our sins.

Yet you, LORD, are our Father.

We are the clay, you are the potter;

we are all the work of your hand.

Do not be angry beyond measure, LORD;

do not remember our sins forever.

Oh, look on us, we pray,

for we are all your people.

Isaiah 64.1-9 (TNIV)

five-sense Friday

2011-11-18T11:48:00.001-07:00

Today is Josh's birthday, and we're living it up. We've been...

seeing: white-frosted everything, from roofs and windowsills to tree branches and cars to bicycles left outside and (with a different sort of frosting) the tops of our breakfast donuts; pale blue sky; drifts taller than our boots; Josh tearing through tissue paper on some pretty great gifts

hearing: the wind as it gusts; voices of family and friends on the phone; more wind

smelling: that distinctive smoky greasy haze of a tiny shop devoted entirely to donuts; the chill of a morning coated in snow; woodsmoke in the background, a constant presence from neighbors who heat with fireplaces

tasting: those donuts (glazed cake, maple bar with nuts, strawberry-covered raised); hot coffee; something delicious on a dinner date (anticipation!)

feeling: the breeze on my cheeks; so thankful for warm coats and boots and hats and gloves for the two-mile trek through a 25-degree wonderland; happy to celebrate another year of life with my guy

Then the Snow

2011-11-17T19:12:00.001-07:00

I'm sitting in a darkened apartment, looking out the front windows on a world covered in thick white. The flakes that twirled down from late afternoon until evening have slowed for now, leaving the sky a milky pink and the branches of our front tree heavy-laden with it, like grocery-store lofthouse cookies only with perhaps quadruple the frosting. I'm not sure how many inches have fallen -- maybe five? Everything looks pillowy and soft, even the street.

I spent the last week in Chicago, meeting with my dissertation committee and seeing beloved friends. It was balmy in Illinois, many of the trees still aflame with their autumnal glory. I walked with my coat unzipped. I crunched through fallen leaves. And everywhere I went, in one of the most uncanny reminders of our connectedness, I saw posters advertising winter in Montana. All over Rogers Park, on the sides of buses, and inside the Red Line train cars that wander north and south and back again through the city, Montana tourism ads boasted about the snow, the skiing, the bison stark brown and encrusted with ice on the ends of their goatees. Friends would refer to these ads in welcoming me back into town, commenting on the loveliness of the photos.

Mostly, I felt their strangeness. I felt them as a reminder of the place I now call "home," even in that place I had considered home for five years, the longest-running abode since I left my parents' house for college more than ten years ago. Returning to Chicago, seeing its skyline lit up as the plane landed one evening last week, climbing down to the train, walking down the streets I had walked hundreds, thousands of times, seeing my people--oh, my people--I felt such a jolt of familiarity and an upsurge of homesickness for them. But seeing those Montana posters nearly every day of my visit, and hearing Josh's voice on the phone, and thinking of the views from my windows and the quiet pace of life, I realized that my place, for now, in the transient space of life-in-between, is this stark and snowy land, this valley hemmed in on all sides by mountains and prone to seven- or eight-month winters.

And it is lovely. The snow's heavy blanketing, its way of erasing distinctions and leaving a world with blurred edges and nighttime glow, is lovely. It is also treacherous, treacherous in a way I feel in my bones as I pray for Josh on his drive home from work. That is the shape of life, though, isn't it? The beauty and the danger, vitally joined like hydrogen and oxygen in the molecules frozen over everything I see tonight. We take them together, and try to focus on the glimmer and wonder.

"Power" by Adrienne Rich (Happy Birthday, Marie Curie!)

2011-11-07T10:41:00.000-07:00

Power

Living     in the earth-deposits     of our history

Today a backhoe divulged     out of a crumbling flank of earth
one bottle     amber     perfect     a hundred-year-old
cure for fever     or melancholy     a tonic
for living on this earth     in the winters of this climate

Today I was reading about Marie Curie:
she must have known she suffered     from radiation sickness
her body bombarded for years     by the element
she had purified
It seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin     of her finger-ends
till she could no longer hold     a tube-test or a pencil

She died     a famous woman     denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds     came     from the same source as her power

1974

Adrienne Rich. The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New 1950-1984. New York: Norton, 1984. 225.

five-sense Friday

2011-11-04T11:25:00.001-06:00

This week, I've been...

seeing: the southern tip of the Bridgers through my newly leafless tree; a good deal of sunlight; snowflakes!

hearing: internet radio while I work on job apps -- oh, beloved WFMT

tasting: homemade barbecue sauce based on memories of my mom's recipe; lots of lemon and decaf chai tea; more oatmeal chocolate-chip cookies than I care to admit

smelling: chili simmering; laundry fresh from the dryer; the dry autumn leaves as I crunch my way downtown

feeling: the forgotten chill of 20-degree mornings; so glad for J's sweatshirts; glad it will soon be light an hour earlier in the morning!

five-sense Friday

2011-10-28T12:35:00.001-06:00

Today, I'm...

hearing: Josh washing dishes before I was quite awake, a really comforting sound; KGLT, one of Bozeman's more eclectic radio stations; my fingers furious against the keys

seeing: mostly, my computer screen, and the tangle of books and papers and notebooks spread all across the couch beside me; the south end of the Bridgers, now that the tree in front of our window has up and lost almost all its leaves (it did this in a day. One day. Temperatures dropped into the teens one night early this week, and then next morning, when the sunlight touched the vibrantly green but frozen leaves, they began to fall in great clumps. It sounded as if the whole tree was rustling, shaking off its tulle and satin. Really, I've never seen such a thing: all morning long, leaves fell like rain, and by nightfall the tree was largely bare. The next two nights of cold curled the remaining leaves into dull, crisp shells of their former selves, and through these dried husks of leaf and thin strands of branch I can see the mountains, bluely covered in trees that will not lose their green.)

tasting: peanut butter toast and tea, and toast with the most wonderful blueberry jam

smelling: cinnamon, laundry, completion

feeling: glad for the soft couch as an office trade-up after days in my desk chair; ready for chapter 5 to be drafted, already; sore wrists from typing 40 pages in four days

Politics of Location

2011-10-24T18:32:00.000-06:00

"Begin with the material. Pick up again the long struggle against lofty and privileged abstraction." (Adrienne Rich, "Notes Towards a Politics of Location")

I am finishing a dissertation. Which is to say, I am writing the last chapter of the middle section, the final author-based chapter before the conclusion. After I finish this chapter (and, heaven help us, my goal is this Friday for a first draft), I will turn to a mixed-up process of drafting the conclusion as I revise the earlier chapters, beginning with a substantial re-write of the introduction.

The introduction and three subsequent chapters total somewhere around 240 pages of double-spaced text at this point, not counting bibliographies. I think the project will come in at approximately 350 pages of text, when all is said and done. Then I will have to format with the grad school standards of wide margins for binding, which may put it over 400 pages. This is a little terrifying to contemplate. I may begin accepting donations for printing costs.

I haven't talked much about the dissertation on this blog, at least not about its content. I thought I might use the blog to work out ideas, post musings about my topics, even post notes from my reading. What I realized, though, is that there is something comforting and good about writing exercises that are more concrete, more material, in Adrienne Rich's words. Writing about sensory details, the small pieces of a life lived in a place and a body, is a good exercise for someone who spends a lot of her time in the heady realm of theories and ideas, discussions of literary form and philosophical ethics. And so I use this space to tell you, for instance, about the hue of the sky and the leaves through the seasons, about the sound of the rain on the windows, about the steam coming off my cup of tea, about recipes that have thrilled me.

Recently a friend emailed and said that she was glad for those sensory snippets, but she also wondered how I was, how the work was going. I will tell you: it is hard to be a writer. It is hard to be a scholar. It is a privilege, and I am especially privileged to be funded and supported (and therefore obligated) to do this work full-time. But the dreaded writer's block does haunt me. Days go by where I feel like nothing happens because I make myself sit at the computer and try to work, knowing that if I don't show up the work will never be accomplished, but the process is slow and I long to just go for very long walks through the leaves or find a novel in the public library and sit in a cafe and read it all day or re-upholster my pitiful chairs or do something, anything else.

And then there are days when it flows, when I find myself engrossed in the research and writing, when pages multiply and time passes unacknowledged and I forget to eat and find myself nearly panting with the joy of the process. There is fear, and there is delight, in this work.

Perhaps in the coming weeks, as I work through my final synthesis of the project, I'll post more about it. Perhaps, in addition to telling you that I've found a phenomenal new method to cook brown rice (!), I'll also tell you about Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and her paradoxical treatment of post-colonial Christianity.

For now, though, I will tell you that the sky is darkening, my desk a pool of lamplight, and that snow is on the way. Snow. And as I write about Adichie's literary representations of Nigeria, contemplating what it means to "speak" through literature, and how it matters who is listening, and what it means to embrace a faith propagated by missionaries who viewed one's culture as wholly wicked and inferior, I am aware of the distance between my own experiences and this other place, this warm place of mangoes and cashews. I write from a cold valley surrounded by whitened mountain ranges. This place--this concrete, material reality--matters in my heady writing, too. That is something to think about.

five-sense Friday

2011-10-21T15:23:00.005-06:00

This week, I've been...

seeing: a deer in the headlights last night on our way home, just beside our building: a doe, grazing in a neighbor's garden, who danced the most graceful dance when our car surprised her in the dark, back and forth, her elegant legs taking her first one way and then the other; what I felt, watching her, was amazement at how exquisite her movements were, and profound identification with that uncertainty--which way? which way?

hearing: my own goofy internet radio stations, all mixed up

smelling: cinnamon

tasting: R's delicious spaghetti squash with butter, garlic, and parmesan last night; white cheddar cheese with cranberries in it; green tea with mint

feeling: that swing of temperatures, from daytime chill to nighttime freeze; sleepy; a bit under the weather; proud of all the applications I've sent off; anxious my writing motivation will never return. Happens every time.

five-sense Friday, parent edition no. 2

2011-10-14T16:24:00.000-06:00

Mom and Dad leave tomorrow. While they've been here, we've been...

seeing: mountains, the first snow of the year down to 7,000 feet, dinosaur bones, pioneer artifacts, lots of delicious restaurant menus, bears and bison and elk at the park, Old Faithful, deer across the street from the apartment; all our favorite places

hearing: each other; the coffee grinder when Dad wakes up very, very early (or not, for those of us who are sleeping hard); Josh's records

smelling: coffee; cinnamon oil; fresh donuts; baking cookies; orange-ginger stir-fry on the stove; apple pie

feeling: chilly days and warm sun; the satisfaction of exploration; glad to be together

tasting: how to list it all? donuts and Mom's spaghetti and five-course steakhouse dinner and caramel-apple french toast and Mexican breakfast burrito and carrots and coffee and turkey and apples and granola and English muffins and eggs and all of it delicious

five-sense Friday, parent edition

2011-10-07T13:10:00.000-06:00

I picked up my parents from the airport this morning, and so they're here participating in the weekly tradition. Today, we are...

smelling: the freshness after a rain (dad), pre-snow (mom), jet fuel, bread toasting in the oven, constant comment tea brewing for iced tea

hearing: the dishwasher dad just miraculously fixed (mad props to him), laughter, me talking to myself

tasting: potato soup and bread, apples!, green onions on the soup, later! bacon and spinach salad and chicken and peaches and red onion and rice and apple crisp and vanilla ice cream!

feeling: chill air, content, excited about grizzly bears and elk (from the car), glad dad fixed our water heater so we don't scald ourselves all the time

seeing: long-lost family!, clouds low over the mountains, magpies, Michigan apples fresh from the farm via my mom's carry-on (best sight ever, other than, of course, the parents themselves)

on sky and cake

2011-10-03T18:23:00.002-06:00

The thing about the sky this evening is that it is thin and palest blue tinged with yellow-white off toward the western edge of the valley, capped by a heavy helmet of thick pewter cloud cover. I know the sun is behind this expanse of opaque grey, or rather I trust that it is, because the plainly drawn line that edges the clouds is frightfully aglow, a rim of golden shining that fades and feathers into the blue behind and--to my eyes--below it. All this sky drama unfolds behind a foreground of evergreens in the green space behind our building, their piny branches upward-reaching and full of birds. The wind is mostly still.

I am feeling energetic, probably due to the caffeine in my not-small piece of chocolate cake, and due to my two-mile ramble to and from the grocery store. At the store, I bought a five-pound bag of organic carrots, four large Idaho potatoes, a 99-cent bag of delicious little cucumbers without pesticides or waxes, a block of kosher cheddar, heads of lettuce and a bunch of green onions. Josh has requested potato soup for tomorrow night's dinner, and I will add spinach to it, and salad on the side. My shoulders ache from the carrying of these root vegetables and other bits of good in a backpack on the way home. I kept an eye out for black bears stealing apples in people's yards, but it was the middle of the day. The only interesting wildlife I saw was a college student on a bicycle who sped past me in the street and did some pretty amazing swooping from side to side.

Tonight I am reading African women's theology and thinking about what it means for me, in my cultural location, to read and learn from African women's theology and to write about it in my dissertation. I am also thinking about my philosophy of teaching, my commitment as a professor of literature and writing to helping students develop practices that matter in their whole lives, not just the classroom. College isn't just for getting a slip of paper to get a job to get money to get whatever else one wants, is it? I feel we have to put a lot of effort into resisting this way of thinking.

The slight wind has shifted the thick space of cloud, and the sun is insistent, shining on the side of my face and casting my shadow on the bright wall across the room. It's too bright to look out the window, but looking over at the wall I see a strengthening light. Funny, the way the sun shines so insistently, even more insistently, in the hour before it dips behind the western mountain range. That last glowing always seems to glow best.

five-sense Friday

2011-09-30T14:55:00.002-06:00

Today, I'm...

smelling: the deliciously sweet steam coming off two big pots of apples cooking during a morning canning party with a new friend; a bit of apple water burning in a boilover, reminiscent of the scent of apple pies dripping over to the oven floor when Mom baked them, the most wonderful variety of burnt sugar

tasting: a Washington peach cut onto my morning granola, and milky black tea accidentally double brewed (I must not have been awake enough to notice the two bags I put in my yellow mug); the tart bite of applesauce made from a Montana fruit tree

hearing: life stories all morning; construction somewhere down the street this afternoon; the quiet of a Friday with students at class or getting ready for their weekends

seeing: fall colors along I-90, more vibrant than anywhere else I've seen in Montana so far; a truck pulling a huge load of lodgepole pine trunks (some of their green bits still attached) merging onto the interstate; recipes for chocolate cakes to celebrate the end of Josh's work week tonight

feeling: sleepy and thankful; a ten-month-old tugging on my necklace at some points, the weight of a mason jar in my jar-grabber's grip at others (his mom and I took turns); the gravitational pull of a stack of articles and books I need to read by, oh, yesterday; glad about chocolate cake

five-sense Friday

2011-09-23T15:57:00.002-06:00

Today, I've been...

seeing: mostly this computer screen, aglow with competing open windows of documents in various stages of drafting and revision; also, breezes flirting with the leaves in the tree outside the living room window and its patches of yellow leaves against a pale blue sky

hearing: the hum of a refrigerator, the sizzle of eggs in a little cast-iron skillet, the sound of a dear friend's voice on the phone--for almost two hours of catching up!

smelling: sunny air, dishwashing soap, the lemon lotion on my very dry hands

feeling: the strange warmth of a late September day, warmer than I expected of the first day of fall in Montana; sleeves pushed up around my elbows; a bit of pressure about all the questions and changes of life, and the rush and hurry of the academic job market; excited to go for a walk once Josh comes home from work

tasting: homemade maple walnut granola and green tea; then decaf black tea with milk; an egg and cheddar sandwich on toast; a juicy late-season nectarine; more milky tea and milk-chocolate digestives from a Sainsbury's in Central London (they made it well in my suitcase); later, I will make some reincarnation of leftovers from a recent roast dinner, with carrots and potatoes and gravy and a wee bit of chicken--Josh might compose me a praise poem if the reincarnation happens to be pot pie

animal sightings report: a Sunday afternoon in Yellowstone

2011-09-19T12:35:00.002-06:00

Yesterday we decided after church to drive down to Yellowstone: Josh had told me about the beautiful and strange sound of elk calls, and we needed to get down to the park while the elk were still feeling romantic. Lucky for us, it was a romantic day for the animals of this national park.

Here are some things we did not have: a camera, binoculars, sighting scope, video camera, jackets.

Here are supplies we picked up at the grocery store: carrots, apples, ginger ale, Better Cheddars, cheap sandwich cookies (because Josh said you have to have them on a trip to Yellowstone).

Here are the animals we saw between 1:30 and 6:30 p.m. (I kept a tally on my map):

bears (probable): 3, from a distance, at least two probably black bears
buffalo/bison: I counted 6, and then a huge herd, and then lost count because there were so many in the park, but the last memorable pairs were

two by a river feeling quite amorous
a mama and little one nursing by another stream, but it looked like the mama was weaning the little one--after a little while, she nudged it toward the grass, and then spun around in circles to make her point clear, and then they were both eating grass

coyote: 1, in a field! pouncing on some prey!
grizzly bears: 3, up close, as in 40 yards or less (we stayed in the car)! A mama and two cubs crossing the street and then climbing a hill covered in fallen logs close to the West Thumb of Yellowstone Lake! Their ambling steps made the fir on their haunches all silvery in the light.
deer: quite a few as dusk descended
birds: a lot
people: so very many, speaking all sorts of languages, some wearing mittens, many with massive cameras, and many evincing ridiculously risky behaviors to get a good shot
moose: 0 (sad face--my one unrealized hope)
elk: for most of the drive, I kept close track: first we saw 2 across a stream, one of them a spike. Then we saw a cow (that's a girl elk) in a stand of trees by a geyser basin. Walking back from the basin, we heard this eerie, beautiful, musical sound. It was a bull elk's love song. If I were an explorer 150 years ago, I would have thought there were fairies in the forest. Then, driving along, we found the probable cause of his song: a harem of lovely cow elk, sitting and eating on both sides of the road. After that, I lost track. When we arrived in Mammoth Hot Springs, the last developed area before the park's North Entrance, traffic slowed and then stopped. It took us a while to realize that there were two bull elk bugling and locking horns in the field to our left! And then as our eyes adjusted to the dusk, we realized that there were maybe two dozen elk in the grassy areas outside the lodge and restaurant. Rangers were keeping people back, but it was all lovely fun. We parked and went inside to use the restrooms, and when we came out the excitement levels were rising: the harem was crossing the street, mamas nudging little ones along, and the bull elk was running at other bull elk, and eventually at cars, to protect his ladies and babies. It was pretty thrilling getting out of there.

And that was our Sunday afternoon in Yellowstone. I guess it's not that typical to see so many bears, so that's a highlight. Also, I can't get the elk music out of my head. You can look up elk calls on YouTube, but I promise, it's much more mysteriously lovely in person.

Also, hint hint, we are now proud owners of an annual pass. Visit us.

five-sense Friday

2011-09-16T13:35:00.000-06:00

Today, I've been...

hearing: rain on the windows, upon waking and in the early afternoon, and then hail; the groan and hiss of a kettle on the electric burner; radio announcers warning of cooler days and nights

smelling: Josh's soapy clean smell; the very satisfying browning of waffles made with cinnamon-and-nutmeg spiced granola; the peculiar and familiar aroma of ramen noodles; a long-ago campfire not quite washed out of J's sweatshirt

seeing: clouds, then sun, then clouds again; piles of chapters with comments from which I must extract and revise writing samples; strange numbers and letters and colors and road signs in the DMV eye test; a new license photo, five years older

tasting: those waffles, with real maple syrup and steaming coffee; that ramen, with carrots and peas; green rooibos tea

feeling: the damp chill, and thick socks on my feet, and Josh's sweatshirt on my arms; a tongue burned by enthusiasm for lunch; a warming tea mug between my hands

Maya Angelou at Montana State University, or, What Colors are Your Rainbows?

2011-09-14T19:15:00.006-06:00

Photo Credit: Sean Sperry, Bozeman Daily Chronicle

Though I've been looking forward to Maya Angelou's visit to Montana State University since I moved to Bozeman back in August, I almost didn't go last night, even though I had a coveted ticket. Yesterday was a very sad day. I learned, upon waking, of a shooting of teenagers on a corner that is very dear to me on Chicago's North Side. Only a little while later, I heard the news of a dear grandmother of that same corner-loving congregation gone missing and discovered with no life left in her precious body.

More than a thousand miles away, I mourned, feeling so far away, so burdened by this sorrow. I prayed as I could. All day long I cast about for ways to support. I wrote letters. I sat and wondered. I simmered brown rice and sauteed vegetables with ginger out of a desperate need to make something whole and good, and then I ate a plateful in silence. I thought about sitting in the dark apartment until Josh came home from work, the sorrow bearing down on my bones.

But I decided to go. As the beloved community of Chicago gathered for a prayer vigil on the corner, I squared my shoulders, picked up my bag, and marched the mile to campus with burning eyes. I smelled neighbors' laundry drying and dinners cooking, heard a father gently correcting his young son and guitars played behind open windows, watched various citizens of the Gallatin Valley converge on the field house--students, faculty, families, retirees. I joined more than 3,000 people streaming into the dim space, where I sat full of my own complicated anonymity.

Dr. Angelou's visit was a big deal for this community, for this university. It was a precious gift. I was proud of the turnout, too. But I'm not going to lie: I felt a little uncomfortable at the accolades students and the college president piled on the writer-activist-wise-woman. Again and again, they spoke of her "inspiration to us all," her example of rising above one's challenges, achieving, succeeding. They did not speak much of her gender. They especially did not speak much of her race. Indeed, race--in a room overwhelmingly populated by white people--felt like an elephant, unnamed. As the introductions wore on, and even as Dr. Angelou's talk began, I was increasingly fidgety: was this all a color-blind, particular-injustice-blind, feel-good affair to encourage middle-class westerners to work hard for their dreams? Really? Was this wise elder playing along with the dominant urge to generalize, to sweep important histories and differences under the rug?

If you read today's news coverage of the event, then yes, really. Angelou did, as numerous news sources are reporting it, "urge" her audience to "find rainbows in the clouds," or to "inspire and be inspired by others"; as I have said, the rhetoric of "inspiration" was overwhelming present. But inspiration for what?

Angelou did riff beautifully on the 19th-century gospel image of God putting a rainbow in the cloud, calling her listeners to find and acknowledge those who are their rainbows, providing hope and guidance, and to be brighter rainbows, themselves. But the core of her lecture, which took a while to arrive, has not appeared in any of the news stories I've read today: Angelou did not simply advocate that her audience find whichever rainbows-in-the-clouds might inspire them to live good lives. Instead, she advocated specifically for a certain group of rainbows that many members of this particular audience has likely overlooked. She asked that they--that we--read black poets, suggesting that such poets were a desperately needed and woefully absent source of challenge and guidance.

This turn in the talk came, to me, as a blessed relief, even as it brought a new discomfort. Angelou introduced her point with a great deal of humor, but there was also a sharpness to it. She was naming a lack, a lack borne of injustice. She said--and here I quote and paraphrase from my notes, scrawled in the dark--"I know you're all way north and west and so you don't know a lot about African Americans." (And here there was a bout of hearty and perhaps surprised laughter from the crowd.) "But I want you to go to the librarian ..." and "say Ms. Angelou sent us to find African American poetry to read." Here, she offered a delightful sketch of how surprised the librarian would be to have any such request (or perhaps any request for literature at all). The next lines, to my mind, were some of the most devastating: she asserted that the librarian would have to search throughout the libraries of the entire state of Montana, and perhaps even into Idaho, to find such poetry.

I wondered about the laughter that followed this jibe. The MSU libraries do, of course, hold books by and about African American writers. But her point was clear: she was speaking to a group, to a place, that has been conveniently removed from some of the nastier elements of the nation's twisted history of race relations but nevertheless affected by them and even benefiting from privileges as a result of them. She was speaking to a group, to a place, that could easily continue to overlook the complexity of race and class, the important contributions of people of color and their particular claims on the public imagination. Hers was a challenge: "You need to know that you have missed out," she said. "You need to know a poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar," she asserted, and went on to quote it. "I wrote this piece and I want you to have it," she insisted, before ending with her own beautiful poem written for the United Nations' 50th anniversary.

Angelou did not only speak of race and African American poets; she also read her 1983 poem about being a carnivorous smoker in a health-food diner, and Edna St Vincent Millay's 1931 "Conscientious Objector," which she offered as a poem of courage (though the poem does allude to injustices in other countries and in the rural south). But the most profound contribution of her lecture was her acute awareness of her audience, the implied critique of a blind spot and answering gift of the musical and challenging words of poets. In performing these poems aloud, Angelou, I hope (and I believe she hoped), opened up in her listeners a deep desire for more. She did not say this explicitly, but as I stood with the audience to applaud her at the lecture's end, I sensed that Dr. Angelou had made an incisive and important point: not only that we all must find--and acknowledge--rainbows, "he-roes and she-roes" to spur us on, but that which rainbows we found mattered a great deal, that missing out on certain rainbows, certain challengers to our status quo view of the world, was to our detriment, dimming our own shining.

I wish the reporters who covered this event had narrated that uncomfortable and inspiring insight.

I am writing about this, myself, at some length because it seems terribly apropos, and not just because I study women writers of color. Walking home in the dark last night, I felt that significance. It was a little after nine, but--unlike this boy in Chicago who also walked home alone a little after nine last night--I had little to worry about. Place, and class, and race, and history--these particularities factor into our vulnerability, into our places within systems of privilege and (in)justice.

This is the difficult dynamic that I am struggling with in my doctoral writing, the difficult dynamic that I struggle with in my faith and my life: on the one hand, we must take the risk of generalizing, if we are to have ethics or theories or theology. An African American woman's wisdom, or a Hispanic boy's experience, can speak just as much to my humanity and yours as a white man's. This has been a hard-earned claim over the past five decades of liberation activism. We are united in our frailty, tied together in our fragility, in our human desiring and breathing and living towards death, and we are united in other ways, in beauty and in love and the longing for relationship. But we are also different, and to overlook those differences can mean erasing certain stories, certain injustices, certain responsibilities, certain triumphs, even certain people.

And so: the tale of three teens shot on the corner is all at once a tale of surprise wounding and fear and danger in a neighborhood that many can identify with, and it is also the specific story of the cycles of violence that plague urban youth, and even more specifically the narratives of three classed and raced and situated boys, and their shooter, and their friends who stood nearby and could have been shot, themselves. And so: the grandmother's is both a familiar story of how death can surprise us and devastate our families, and it is also a very particular, very private story of loss, and trans-continental migration, and survival, and raced and gendered and classed and historied vulnerability. These stories, in the broadest strokes, are mine, because they are stories of human experience and because they are the stories of people in a community I have loved and tried falteringly to know. And at the same time, they are not my stories to tell, to pretend I understand, to interpret as having something to do with me. They do, and they do not.

The ultimate challenge is for us to do the work of seeking out those other stories that make up the tapestry of our collective communal and national and global human experience. The challenge, especially for those of us privileged by where we are from, or education, or economics, or how we look, is to listen to one another, to sit at the feet of our elders, to cross divides and get to know people, to welcome neighbors and refugees and teens and strangers into our homes and to listen to their voices, and to respond when they welcome us into their homes and want to hear stories of our own. The challenge is for us to seek out volumes in the library that challenge our limited view of the world, surprising us with reminders of both how alike and how different we are from various others. I've said this before, but I feel this lesson's weight again today in contemplating Dr. Angelou's lecture and the Chicago sorrows. We need more poems and stories, and we need more rainbows, and we need them in all hues.

Tonight I will pray for neighbors and strangers. Tonight I will return to a novel by a Native American woman, and I will think about history, and my responsibility to it, and how its story is not mine, and how its story is mine. I'm hoping you will do something similar.

five-sense Friday

2011-09-09T19:47:00.001-06:00

Amazingly enough, I am back again, hemmed in by mountains and quieted by cool breezes. Over the past days, though, I've been...

seeing: precious, precious friends and places; eagles stretched across the sky; waves on large bodies of water; clouds, from above

smelling: a babygirl's sweet presence in my arms, morning coffee made by someone else, the coriander-familiar scent of the landscaping on campus, the contrast between city and country

hearing: the voices of dear friends, and their laughter, and their honesty; the hard words of committee members advising revisions; a new friend on my last flight singing "Bloom Where You're Planted" to me with all the wisdom of 50 years as a military wife

feeling: everso hot, and then chilled; delighted to see people I love, the weight of a little boy on my lap as we color, my stomach lurch with takeoffs and landings

tasting: a fresh crop of apples; Dunkin Donuts and a pumpkin spice latte; chocolate; popcorn with cheese (how could I not?)

some things change, and some things stay the same

2011-08-23T10:43:00.002-06:00

Last night I stood in a kitchen I am still learning to call "mine" and peeled small red beets I'd thinned from my mother-in-law's garden. I sliced them into quarters and steamed them on the stove. Then I turned to the bag of sweet peas in their pods, snapping their ends and sliding my thumbs through their seams to release little green balls of the freshest-tasting green into a white ceramic bowl. On Sunday, I stood in the relentless sun in the garden's tangle of vines, trying my best to tell weeds from food and pull the right ones, wearing the same dress I'd worn that morning to the country church of Josh's youth and a borrowed pair of rubber boots usually reserved for egg-gathering, my hands covered in dirt. Leaning over to pull a pea pod from the vine, I slit it open with my nail and pulled off its peas with my teeth: they were warm in my mouth, and so very green-tasting that I was back in my grandma's garden in Michigan, back in my own suburban backyard seeking out growing things with that green scent or taste, a green that only remains for moments after something is picked. I had forgotten my childhood longing for that scent, that flavor, and here it was again, on my tongue, 1,700 miles west, 5,000 feet up, and 20 years later.

Moving is hard work. Leaving a beloved place after five years is hard, period. I find myself reaching for drawers and light switches in this new apartment that do not exist here; I find myself thinking about heading down to Lake Michigan, or checking on the gardens on my walk to campus, or getting cheap Thai takeout (which also doesn't exist here!) ... My body knows the space it occupied for those years, and my feet know the sidewalks, and my arms know the breezes, and my palate knows the flavors, and my cooking impulses know the available produce. Not to mention my heart, and what it knows.

I am already in love with this place, as I have been for years on visits, and its broadest of skies and its strange afternoon rain storms. I have a handful of kind friends here, a hilarious family that is generous and good to me. I live a three-minute walk from a hiking trail, close to idyllic community gardens, streams and creeks. I am learning the fingers-up-off-the-steering-wheel wave and head-nod that signify human connection with anyone I pass on a country road. The mountains are heartbreakingly beautiful in their layered horizon presence, blue and shadowy and green and grey. On Sunday, driving north, Josh and I saw not just deer but also a black bear, ambling up and down a grassy hill.

But here there are no Sunday morning Mexican pastries, no Sunday night youth group craziness, no Monday night women's storytelling meetings, no cooking for Friday night girls group, no potlucks at the beach, no Thursday afternoon playdates, no being honked at and shouted greetings by name across the street on any given day. There are no five-minute snatched catch-up times in the library, no checking in at the grad student office, no Dunkin Donuts coffee (!!!). There will not be several months of autumn, my favorite season, with deciduous trees all gloriously aflame. There are serious gaps in life, now, and I mourn the losses.

And yet--my fingers know the feel of butter rubbed into flour and baking powder and salt and cinnamon. This is the same. As is the voice of dear friends on the phone, the rhythm of their punctuation in emails, the shape of their handwriting in letters. Same, too, are the common everyday tasks that keep life moving: the chopping of vegetables, the toasting of bread, the boiling of water, the hauling of laundry baskets up and down stairs (!). I know these books that line my shelves, by sight and touch and scent and weight. I stream the Chicago classical radio station over the internet, comforted by the voices of those dearly familiar broadcasters. I tidy, I bake, I eat, I sleep, my head cradled by the same pillow as always. I dream of then, the past and the future. I miss the ones I love, and I take hope in the patch of light falling over that same old broken couch, and I make a life here, little by little. I find beauty in the differences, and beauty in things that never really change.

five-sense Friday

2011-08-19T09:56:00.000-06:00

Today, I'm...

seeing: bright patches of sunlight on the living room carpet, and the well-lit green trees

hearing: classical radio, my own fingers typing, the quiet I still haven't gotten used to after Chicago

smelling: rosemary-mint shampoo, blueberry herbal tea, woodsmoke in a sweatshirt

tasting: leftover summer plum cake for breakfast, a successful first baking attempt at 5,000 feet

feeling: warm as I sit in that patch of sunlight on the carpet, curled up in it like a cat

low-tech blogging

2011-08-18T13:01:00.000-06:00

five-sense Friday

2011-08-12T11:41:00.000-06:00

Hello, good world! Today I'm...

hearing: the strange quiet after the roofers finished across the street yesterday; birds in the trees; breezes in leaves; Josh slowly working his way through his stash of unmarked mix CDs in the other room

smelling: shampoo in my still-damp hair; an insistently ripe California peach in the fruit bowl; cinnamony chai tea

tasting: that peach, cut up, with northwest blueberries and vanilla yogurt and granola; that chai; later: dark black tea and one of my jealously hoarded chocolate digestive biscuits from a grocery store in London

feeling: a dryer mountain climate, with its hot daytime sun and cool nights and breezes all day long; also, my chapped fingers and lips still getting used to the climate; also, missing my dear, dear friends in Chicago

seeing: our apartment slowly taking shape, with fewer and fewer boxes; novels to read for fun, lined up like a tantalizing promise; morning bright from east-facing windows, and evening gold from west-facing windows; mountains on every horizon

hold your breath: the mountains will find you, probably over the next hill

2011-08-05T08:58:00.000-06:00

Just now, I am supposed to be putting new shelf paper in my new kitchen cabinets. The eastern sun (up over the Bridger range) is slatting itself in long pale lines between the living room blinds across the carpet, and I am sitting in its glow.

Since I last updated this blog, I have been to London and back (photos of Oxford on facebook! or a few here!), and J and finally decided for sure to spend a sabbatical year or so out west (recognizing that we won't always have this freedom), and we packed up our Chicago apartment and said our goodbyes and drove toward the setting sun. For three days. The third day we drove for 17 hours.

And suddenly, here we are. In an apartment filled with boxes, with tiles in the kitchen that have little acorns and mushrooms on some of them, in a neighborhood that is 70% college students, with a view of trees from our windows and mountains every time we take the garbage out.

Already, I am teary with the missing of: friends around every corner, the dearly familiar market down Morse Avenue, Thursday afternoon play dates, Lake Michigan's wide and wise expanse. But I am also hopeful about this place, thankful for its chill morning and evening air even after 90-degree days, friends who offer to bring over dinner on our first night here, family here (and the friends of that family! who show up to unload a stranger's moving truck!), the promise of Shakespeare in the Park tonight, within walking distance. And the man sitting across the room (working towards a writing deadline planned before this move), haloed in that generous morning sun. Here we find ourselves, resting after the journey: breathing in the journey.

five-sense Friday

2011-07-01T17:14:00.000-06:00

Today, I've been...

seeing: tree leaves thick and vibrant with last night's rain, reaching up for the promised more to come; downed branches all alone and maybe-lonely for their tree-homes; the face of my love across a suburban restaurant table, studying his books, so very dearly freckled

smelling: rain
tasting: coffee with milk, brownie, salad with purple olives

feeling: my first-ever stitches tugging through numbed skin, and the strange lack of control over my body's response to its loss of flesh (in this case an area of moderately abnormal cells)--the cold sweat, pounding heart, ringing ears--and then feeling absolutely well

hearing: my parents' voices, the most familiar and precious, and their support, and their love; Bon Iver's haunting...what might have been lost; and Iron and Wine's hope:

Curiosity far greater than our fear
It felt so simple, so prodigious at the same time
Incredible things are happening in the world
Magical things are happening in this world.

Blanking on the Seventh Day?

2011-06-28T14:23:00.001-06:00

Recently I have been dashing off paintings in a watercolor journal as a spiritual practice. I generally read through the coming Sunday's lectionary passages each morning, and a few weeks ago the first selection was the first chapter of Genesis. I'd been contemplating the biblical creation account recently, and the timing of the lectionary text struck me as significant, somehow. I decided to spend a little more time with it, to consider its poetry, to let it sink in rather than grappling with it intellectually. So I pulled out my cheap-cheap Crayola watercolors and started a painting a day, most days of the week.

I am not a visual artist. I loved drawing as a child, but I'm not very good with representational art. The rules for this recent spiritual practice, thus, have been that I'm not allowed to over-think it, or plan out my 4x6 page, or agonize, or even draw ahead of time. I've been trying to let go, to explore how washes of color overlaid with the ancient words represented the truths of the story. The movement of brush to jam jar of water to dried paint to page--the seep and spread of blues and browns and greens--the careful strokes to form letters--have begun to bring me great joy. I've been praying differently. I look forward to mornings.
Over two weeks, I completed six paintings. I walked past them as these days progressed, drying on the dining room table. I grew accustomed to filling my jam jar while I made my tea, dipped a brush in coffee once instead of water, laughed at my pitiful attempts at a grizzly bear on day six.

And then I came to the end. Day seven. God rested.

I filled my jar, opened my plastic watercolor palette, spread my journal flat, took up my brush. I re-read the passage in Genesis:

1 Thus the heavens and the earth were completed in all their vast array.
2 By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work. 3 Then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done. (Genesis 2:1-3, TNIV)

I stared at my small rectangle of white, its thick quiet presence a welcome to my paint. I drank my tea. I slouched in my chair. I ate my breakfast. I stood.

The jam jar of water sat on the table all day, the journal open next to it, the little cakes of paint waiting. Come evening, the jar remained, its water clear as morning and only slightly diminished by evaporation. I could have taken up that jar to drink. Before going to bed, I poured it out.

How am I to paint God resting?

Light and dark, sky and sea, land and water, trees and grasses, sun and moon and stars, creatures to fly and swim, creatures to crawl and walk--all these things I can imagine. For all these creations I can splash paint onto a page, drag its tones to the very corners of the paper, set down language and colors together. I can flip through these dried depictions, smile at the rather cheerful moon, delight in the fade of yellow to orange, the mystery of blue sky and blue sea. I can see that, yes, indeed, it was very good.

But what does rest look like? What color is it? What shape? What does it mean for God to rest? For a day to be holy?

What does it mean for work to be finished? What does it mean for something to be fully completed and fully good? How does one represent the act and the feeling of stepping back and simply relishing what has been done?

My page is still blank, leaving me with something to think about. And how would you fill it?

five-sense Friday

2011-06-24T16:51:00.000-06:00

Today, I've been...

smelling: mown grass; city summer (sewer stench laced with flowering bushes, bus exhaust swirled with grilling food); the sweet warm familiarity of a coffee shop

hearing: relative quiet brought about, perhaps, by the overcast sky and cooler breezes; birds and horns and a Street Wise seller telling me to have a blessed day; Bon Iver

seeing: steely clouds, seven stamps lined up in the corner of a manilla envelope just so

tasting: delicious granola, orange chicken, cafe au lait

feeling: the heavy pull of grocery bags against both palms, the weight of laundry baskets propped against my hip, and first thing: the early-morning joy of cool sheets against my limbs and the promise of a good new thing

five-sense Friday

2011-06-17T07:41:00.000-06:00

smelling: fresh-cut grass, faint cigarette smoke from the neighbor who smokes on the back porch (reminds me of Grandma or Europe), summertime city

hearing: traffic (the slow-growing muted roar of a bus or a big truck, the constant beeping of backing-up construction equipment) and Josh opening and closing drawers in the other room

seeing: piles and piles of books to read, and my own tilted handwriting in the margins of the books I've just read this week; patches of blue sky, and birds dashing around in it

tasting: milky tea along with homemade cinnamon granola with a peach cut up on top -- the most wonderful summer breakfast

feeling: a bit of a breeze, a bit of a hand cramp from holding all those books over my head while I sprawl out on the couch, the roughness of mass market paperback pulpy paper against the edge of my right hand as I underline and annotate; also, curious about the future

on finishing things and taking out stitches

2011-06-12T15:37:00.000-06:00

Tonight is our last youth group meeting. The air is full of fluff from fluff-making trees (dogwoods?), and the irises on their thick stalks are tossing their ruffled heads all along the way to the beach. We are going to cart down charcoal and veggie burgers and turkey hot dogs and whatnot. We are going to throw Frisbees and kick soccer balls and raise a general ruckus with a gaggle of teenagers, and then it will be over.

I'm sitting on the couch gearing up for this. I'm thinking it over. I'm drinking water to replace the water sneaking out of the corners of my eyes when I'm not paying attention. Tricky tears, they think they're fooling me. Let's just say: in these past few years, these teenagers (and almost-teenagers) have grown on me.

I've also been picking out stitches, painstakingly, from a sundress I've been working on. I was impatient last weekend and dashed in through the sewing machine, so now I have eight circles of elastic-bobbined stitches to remove so that I can do it all over again, slowly and properly. This is not the sort of stitching one can rip out: it is stitching that must be picked out, stitch by stitch. Hundreds, even thousands of stitches. A little ashamed of myself, I'm going backwards, developing a crick in my neck and hand spasms, in order to be able to begin from the beginning.

There's probably a lesson in the stitches story: measure twice, cut once, etc. This practice of pulling out stiches is drilling into my muscles and ligaments a lesson that I hope will stay with me. It is also giving me time to think. I'm thinking about how good work is often hard, and how it takes a long time, and how its value is often impossible to recognize until after the fact.

I've also been thinking about how meeting with the same crowd of teenagers Sunday night after Sunday night shapes a person. Their jokes, their music, their YouTube videos, their homework woes and groundings and big questions--they start to sink in. As do their smiles, and their laughter, and their fascination with shoe laces, and their crazy interruptions and hilarity and singing while they wash dishes. All these little moments, these Sunday nights and Friday nights and Sunday mornings and trips and conversations, have been like stitches in the fabric of my life, some of them perfect and strong, some of them uneven and knotted. But there's no going back and removing what has been, even if this is the end of something: it's only forward from here. I'm head over heels for each and every one of these not-quite-grown-ups. You couldn't pay me a million dollars to rip those stitches out.

five-sense Friday

2011-06-10T13:03:00.000-06:00

Today, I'm...

feeling: the cool breezes against my toes and forehead, so welcome after mid-week sweltering; the stubborn resistance of a shaggy calzone dough in my bread bowl

hearing: J's eclectic music selections, after a Jars of Clay/Arcade Fire binge (strange combination?)

smelling: coffee from the kitchen, laundry detergent, Vidalia onions chopped for calzones

tasting: omelets with feta, fruit on the side; leftover malted milk eggs, stolen from their glass jar to dissolve against my tongue

seeing: cloudy skies, flyers and emails for missing persons, photographs of irises, stamps on letters to far away

musings

2011-06-09T13:39:00.000-06:00

Would you like to hear a not-poem about my life? Here it is.

We have been traveling. Suddenly we are more than a week into June. Chicago is gem-like, trees and grasses all soaked through with sunlight emerald shine. This is a week of irises.

The breeze is chilled now, after a night of restless indecision, storms and stillness, lightning and window curtains whipped about, rain pelting and retreating and pelting again. I waver between taking my tea iced and hot. I am relieved to welcome the cold into this suffocating living space: I bow to it, usher it in. Thank you, breeze, for joining me at the table. Thank you for cooling my toes.

We spent a week and a half nestled among mountain ranges in a valley known since ancient times for its flowers. We grew accustomed to spotting mule deer, antelope, magpies, pheasant, even elk. Returning to the city, I have caught myself more than once looking for something alive and skittish on the horizon. I walk along the most treed streets, content myself with squirrels and sparrows. I keep appointments, make new ones, dream of high-flowing rivers and garden beds.

We do not know what comes next. We have calmed and quieted our souls.

I am: writing a dissertation. Preparing for a conference. Wondering about whether to renew our lease. Slicing onions in early afternoon. Filled with holy longings.

five-sense Friday

2011-06-03T17:02:00.000-06:00

These past few weeks have been full of travel. Tonight I'm grabbing a few moments alone in my parents' house -- couldn't tell you the last time that happened. Everything is lit with evening sun glow on grass and maple leaves, and I'm feeling nostalgic. I'm also...

feeling: worn out after all the wandering; thankful for family; in love with the Michigan trees

tasting: leftover pizza and salad; anticipation to get back into my own kitchen

hearing: laughing children; car doors; the family cat purring a request for food

smelling: freshly mown grass and my sister-in-law's cake-baking

seeing: the light, the trees, and all sorts of people I love

five-sense Friday

2011-05-20T16:50:00.000-06:00

Photo credit: Dad

Well, friends, this week has been a doozy. (Or do you spell it "doozie"? Google tells me the y is right.) Last Saturday J graduated (such a fancy hood--I made him wear it to dinner that night!), and then Sunday we had lots of people troop through our apartment to eat cake, and then suddenly it was the next week, and my parents were heading back home, and I had small group and dinner out and a birthday dinner party and a conference paper and a new fascination with the season finales of Castle and Bones. (This is getting pretty true-confessiony. Here's the story: during Lent, when I was fasting from beautiful blogs of people I don't actually know and focusing more on my creative writing, I couldn't help but fall into following two new shows with novelists as main characters, could I? Plus mystery!)

So in these busy days, I have been...

hearing: Josh's expanding vinyl collection; tour guides around campus extolling its wonders to prospective students; laughter and airplanes

seeing: rain on the windowpanes, blue in the sky, red in the tulips, green in the grass, low-lying fog creeping between buildings over the sidewalk

smelling: lilacs! quiche! coffee!

tasting: more sweets than I care to admit; the promise of Thai later tonight

feeling: breezes and sun, fog on my cheeks, the weight of a conference paper that just won't be finished, anticipation for upcoming mountain views.....

changes

2011-05-19T11:29:00.000-06:00

The shape of my life, recently, has followed the frantic ups and downs of our midwestern spring: drawn-out chill giving way to sticky-hot and then back again to surprise fog and near-frost. We have had rain, and clouds, and rain, and patches of blue sky and sun illuminating new grass so green one's eyes water just to look at it.

These have not been easy days. They have held their celebrations, given up the sweet joys of accomplishment and family meals, friends' faces glowing in candlelight over dishes of sorbet, kind words and myriad generosities. But these days have also held their pains, their disappointments, their unanswered questions, their headaches (literal and not-so literal).

As a follower along the Way of Christ, I take comfort in the rhythms of scripture. This coming Sunday's lectionary readings have been tugging at me:

My times are in your hands.

Like newborn babies, crave pure, spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow in your slavation, now that you have tased that the Lord is good.

And I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. You may ask for anything in my name, and I will do it.

I also take comfort in the blue of my plate, the weight of my knife and fork, the solidity of a potato and roasted green beans and dusting of salt and pepper. Our days are not accidental, and the beauties in them do not leave us unattended.

five-sense Friday

2011-05-13T19:53:00.000-06:00

Oh, today. Today was good. Today my parents were in town, and while Josh was occupied with pastoring- and seminarying- and graduating-type things, and we missed him a great deal, the three of us had a rather full and rather good day. At various points in this day, we ...

saw: tulips all open and aflutter in rainbow variety; lions and tigers and monkeys; a sunny sky and bright green grass give way to low-lying fog and haze; our own reflections in lots of storefronts; Cubs fans in costume; public schoolkids in matching shirts running around, like people versions of those crazy tulips; through a lens

heard: screaming children (and parents); chirping birds; screaming children; a knock at the door; each other

felt: warm and then not warm in the twenty-five-degree drop; wind; glad for tea; sore feet (in the best way)

smelled: coffee; baking brownies and lemon cakes and pizza; french fries; fishy penguin lunch

tasted: coffee and bagels and almonds and Five Guys and tea and pizza and salad and a very, very sour and sweet and spicy chewy candy on a stick I bought from a lady in one of the little markets...mmmm.

Dad's medium is photos: I link when he posts them.

Also: can't believe J graduates tomorrow. Seriously.

lest two Fridays go by without a five-sense post...

2011-05-06T20:33:00.000-06:00

In the nick of time, here goes. My life recently has been all rich and full, super-saturated with joys and beauties and questions and sorrows, damp with endless rain, frantic with new growth. Have you seen the trees? They're so alive with themselves and their new green it almost hurts to look at them. In addition to pausing each day to look up at these trees, I have been...

seeing: undergraduates in the throes of finals, peering into screens, asleep over books, holding end-chewed pens and emptying teal paper cup of coffee after cup of coffee

hearing: a fellow walk by with another fellow, naming all the flowers in the street landscaping: "See, this is a tulip, and that's a daffodil..." Also, the sea of tapping in a silent study space on campus as dozens and dozens of fingers finished final papers (and updated facebook statuses)

smelling: a car full of catered restaurant food this afternoon, all spiced and magical, on the way to an event; students walking past my chair with coffee cups; leaves unfurling (can you smell this in the air? I swear I can)

tasting: daily chocolate from Easter gifts; chimney cakes; feta cheese

feeling: tonight, at our end-of-the-year English grad student party, a small dog kept standing on its hind legs and resting its front paws on ... the back of my dress. And I kept thinking someone was getting fresh. Ha!

five-sense (Good) Friday

2011-04-22T16:27:00.000-06:00

Mine is a flip-flopped faith tradition. It recognizes life in death, hope in the risky paradoxes of self-offering. The first is last, the last is first. The Holy One took on flesh and lived among us, and what we do to the least of these, we do to the Most High, the One who suffers with us.

On this darkest and most good of Fridays, I sit without a sense of what to say. I have been feeling cold rain on my cheeks, warm soup slipping from my spoon past my lips, a three-year-old hand in mine as we cross the street. I have been tasting salty broth and cinnamon-infused tea, tasting the sorrow of faraway friends' sadnesses. I have been seeing musical instruments all over my dining room floor, lists of books to read, shadows in the corners, my closest cousin's firstborn's early steps on a tiny screen. I have been hearing Josh's guitar, sirens wailing down the street, laughter down the hall. I've been smelling boiling potatoes, aged pages, cold and wet dirt. The beauty is all tangled with the pain, like roots and soil, like the fabric of our human days.

The suffering, the joy of it. Today what I am sensing is the deep heart-longing for full life: for resurrection.

five-sense Friday

2011-04-15T08:19:00.000-06:00

It's been a crazy few weeks -- my head has been in the writing process, with breaks for major life events and occasional bouts of fully engaged humanness. Yesterday I turned in a draft of this third chapter to my dissertation director (probably should have done so a week ago), and my head is so frazzled I don't even know for sure how to feel relieved. I have some other deadlines looming (read: today), so it's out of the frying pan and into the fire.

However, spring is sneaking up on me. That's probably the theme of my sense of the world this week, when I've been...

seeing: the green bulb shoots in the courtyard assert themselves, grow so tall they flop over in rain, and then (suddenly! yesterday!) burst into daffodils so proudly yellow it nearly hurts to look at them

hearing: insistent bird-chirping, and the city-neighborhood noise I always forget through the winter when the windows are closed--children laughing and yelling their way to school, cars, doors slamming shut, birds birds birds

smelling: the garlic and onion shadows of last night's veggie pot pie, spiced with marjoram and thyme

tasting: that dinner, and the first ice cream of the season, and delicious lunch with a friend, and plenty of coffee and tea

feeling: breezes, bare toes, rain splatters, and relief

five-sense Friday

2011-04-08T15:47:00.000-06:00

Today I'm...

feeling: the warm / cool of inside / outside, back and forth; the satisfied fullness of a big grocery stock-up, my muscles sore from carrying bags and my cupboards stocked again

hearing: radiators, and wondering how much longer I'll have with them this year!

smelling: coffee in the hallways of my apartment building and the hallways of two buildings on campus and on the sidewalk outside the coffee shop... jealous of all those drinkers of coffee

tasting: yummy treats at an event on campus, including these deliciously salted dark-chocolate covered almonds...

seeing: raindrops on windowpanes; a finished draft; a lot to be thankful for

five-sense Friday

2011-04-01T10:01:00.000-06:00

Today, I'm...

seeing: early sunlight, and then clouds rolling in; pigeons winging their wide way to the top of the yellow brick church at the corner; tiny white and purple flowers showing their faces in a nearby yard

smelling: dirt and green leaves; rain on the way; vanilla candles lit in prayer and hope

hearing: J and a favorite 3-year-old playing guitars together in the dining room

tasting: two cups of tea, and counting

feeling: anticipation

five-sense Friday

2011-03-25T08:22:00.000-06:00

Today I'm ...

seeing: a cloudy sky bright enough to illuminate sheets of yellow legal paper covered in notes (pencil, red ink, green ink, blue ink, black ink)

hearing: radiators (how much longer?) and a really lovely instrumental rendition of a piece by Hildegard von Bingen (plaintive is the word that always comes to mind)

smelling: soap fragrance on lingering shower steam, every time I walk past the bathroom door

tasting: leftover apple and cranberry pie for breakfast!

feeling: the ache and wonder of spring and writing

What I Do: Writing a Dissertation

2011-03-23T16:43:00.000-06:00

Most of the people who read this blog know me personally--in the flesh, I mean--whether we see each other frequently or not, and many of the people who know me are utterly mystified by what I'm doing these days. Most of them know I am "writing" a "dissertation." As for what this "writing" looks like and what this "dissertation" involves, though, for many it's a little foggy. Today I've decided to pull back the heavy curtain (I imagine that it's velvet, and purple) and expose my daily life. And here's a promise: it will not be very fascinating.

"Writing" a "dissertation," for me, does not actually involve writing most days. Or rather, the writing isn't my own carefully crafted prose: I'm taking notes, drawing diagrams, scrawling barely legible ideas for later thought. Most days, my work is actually reading.

Here is how I read: bolt upright in a smallish research carrel on the second floor of the university library; lying on my back on the couch; sitting sideways in one of our two cheap but woefully uncomfy Ikea chairs; on the living room rug, crosslegged; elsewhere in the library. Sometimes I lie on my back holding a book over my face and do bicycle kicks (I read Dorothy Day's The Long Loneliness like this), to combat the muscle atrophy that inevitably accompanies library research. When I'm doing serious reading, I need to sit up, though, so I can take proper notes.

The reading leads me into other reading: this is how research in the humanities works. Reading one book or article or chapter leads me, though its footnotes and citations, to scribble down references and chase them down in libraries and online, and then I go through another bout of reading. It opens up. This idea leads to another one, and so on. As you might imagine, this research could go on and on and on. At some point, one must stop oneself. I'm pretty bad at this part. Case in point: through most of January, February, and March, I have been working on Chapter 3, which concerns Toni Morrison. My dissertation looks at how contemporary women writers challenge some philosophical, theological, and feminist ethical views of suffering and self-sacrifice, so I've been doing a lot of research on womanist theory and theology. (Womanist theory may or may not be black feminist theory, depending on who you ask.) To that end, I have read around 60 books and articles--about a quarter of them full-length books, in addition to re-reading all of Morrison's novels and reviewing the research I've done on her work in the past (for two class presentations and three term papers, two of which I revised--twice--for journals).

Needless to say, when those of you who see me in the flesh think I seem a little distracted, it's because I am. My brain is full. If you squeeze me, I leak information. Seriously, try it.

I am reading all this material because I am seeking to say something new and important about how we make meaning with language, and literary language in particular. Even more particularly, I am seeking to say something about how contemporary literature exposes us, schools us, in certain ways of thinking and responding to ethical dilemmas in our wildly complex context.

So along with reading, I do a lot of thinking. Here is how I think: while washing dishes (though Josh often does this), hauling laundry up and down three flights of stairs, walking to and from campus, scrubbing the tub, coloring in coloring books, out loud to Josh at dinner or on the phone with (perhaps unlucky) friends, writing in journals, pacing the floor, playing piano, chopping vegetables, stirring vegetables, gazing out a window, half dozing before a night of sleep. I think in my brain, but also in computer documents and on sheets of newsprint with markers and in the various and sundry notebooks that occupy my spaces. Also, I go through phases with index cards.

And then, after lots of reading, and thinking, and mapping, and planning, I begin to write. Usually getting into this writing is agonizing. I do things to avoid it (like writing elaborate blog posts explaining how I do it). Once I start, I sort of fly, and all the thoughts gel, and I'm manically productive until a fifty-page chapter draft is finished. This may involve an unfortunate absence of hair-washing and real food, but it is always wonderful.

Then comes the work of revision. Toni Morrison claims this is her favorite part, but I sort of wonder if she lied.

For each chapter of my dissertation--which has six chapters, though many in the humanities have four or five--I repeat this process: reading, thinking, writing, revising. Each time, I have just an inkling of what I will argue, like a scientist's hypothesis, and I must search and struggle with the existing materials in order to come to my new thesis, my own contribution. It is exhausting, a very long process with little feedback or encouragement. But I have chosen this work--or it has chosen me. And while I should be honest and admit that I don't always love it (for instance: in the greyest months), I often do. Even more so, I love what it means, what it opens up, for when I've finished this project I will be able to revise it for publication, share it with the world. And when I've finished I will be credentialed to carry its insights into the classrooms as a professor, opening up the possibilites of imagination and justice to generations of students. This is a beautiful prospect. It keeps me going, even on the greyest of days.

Spring - Gerard Manley Hopkins

2011-03-21T14:32:00.000-06:00

"Irises" by Vincent van Gogh (image via the Getty Museum)

Nothing is so beautiful as Spring –
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.

What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden. – Have, get, before it cloy,
Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.

(thanks to the Poetry Foundation)

five-sense Friday

2011-03-18T10:23:00.000-06:00

This morning I've been working on revisions and thinking about possible futures. Heady stuff. I'm also firmly planted in a time and place and body, though, so I'll take a moment to attend to this reality. Today I'm...

hearing: piano+oboe on the radio; building engineer clomping around on the roof to manage the inevitable spring old-building leaks; ticking clock

smelling: that wonderful fragrance of toasting bread

seeing: the piles and stacks growing unruly again--always more paper, and where to put it? Also, sunshine and steely sky

feeling: changing temperatures! bare feet on wooden floors!

tasting: leftover toasted soda bread, honey, jam, tea; for lunch...? something good, let's hope

five-sense Friday

2011-03-11T07:33:00.000-07:00

Have you seen the sunshine today?

hearing: birds in the alley, chirping away

smelling: not much, but the stuffy nose is getting better!

tasting: dark, dark tea and coconutty granola

seeing: sunshine! blue sky!

feeling: chill on my arms; sadness at the juxtaposition of all this beauty against sad news from Wisconsin, and Lybia, and now Japan.

2011-03-02T16:40:00.000-07:00

five-sense Friday

2011-02-25T08:24:00.000-07:00

There's always beauty.

seeing: my red mug, an elegant and kind gift that cheers me morning and afternoon; a sky that can't make up its mind

hearing: college radio (playing tracks off concept albums -- the DJ just said, pretty awkwardly, "Well, I just ... don't understand that one ....")

smelling: spicy-clovey tea

tasting: A's magical granola

feeling: glad for meaningful work; full

things that keep me going

2011-02-19T10:56:00.000-07:00

Writing a dissertation is a hard and long and sometimes isolating process. There's not a lot of immediate feedback or positive reinforcement. But some things really keep me going when I'm stuck at my computer transcribing notes or browsing articles. This is not the sort of blog where I mostly just link to other things, but today I'll share a bit of the internet magic that inspires or encourages me or makes me chuckle.

1. Music. For instance, I really, really love Iron and Wine and have been listening to their online stuff. I also love my Iron and Wine Pandora station. Also, and this is so random, I love listening to Bryan Cahall perform "Praise be the Ragtime Band." -- we saw him perform it live last summer at an event at the U.S. Social Forum, and since then it randomly comes to mind. It reminds me of the Anne Sexton poem "Welcome Morning," which I also adore.

2. I like to follow the blogs of people who create things and have a keen eye for beauty through a camera lens (which I do not): Sandra Juto, that crocheter and designer and eater of beautiful foods who recently moved to Berlin, or Brian Ferry, in London, for instance. I love to keep up with the daily posts at habit (and have deep thoughts about the beauty of a community of women recognizing the loveliness of the everyday). I also enjoy the projects 3191 Miles Apart and this joy+ride, as well as Jennifer Causey's most recent project, The Makers. Lovely photography! Poems! Details about the daily lives of creative people!

3. I also like to think about things I can make with my hands when I'm giving my hard-working brain a break. So I keep up with Craft: and whipup, and a number of other individual crafters' blogs. I also do endless searches for patterns and photos of granny squares, crochet doilies, and affordable natural fiber yarns (recent brainstorm! If you have any yarn stash remnants of any weight or color that you'd like to contribute to my Great Granny Square Endeavor, I'll send you reimbursement for postage in a lovely thank-you note if you send them my way!). Also, searches for red and white quilts (I plan to make one someday soonish), which is why I was so excited today to see this link at the blog Angry Chicken.

4. And then there are the cooking blogs. I'm a fan of Smitten Kitchen and Orangette. I've also recently begun to enjoy Remedial Eating and Dinner: A Love Story.

There's more. I try to keep up with news sources and journalism and literary stuff. Movie trailers are a three-minute treat and help me keep updated on a scene I can't afford (financially or schedule-wise) to delve into in the two-hour-stretches. I also follow a few theology blogs, though that is much more Josh's world than mine.

And you? What's your web magic? Where do you find information, inspiration, and also the temptation to fritter away your time? Do tell!

five-sense Friday

2011-02-18T15:26:00.000-07:00

Today I'm...

seeing: sunshine! a fern on the top of my cafe au lait! thousands of printed words on pages! ink on my fingers! and a robin!

hearing: "Tree by the River" (Iron and Wine); myself think; later: girl voices

smelling: grapefruit; coffee-shop; mud

feeling: the ache of heavy grocery bags; the cool of wind in my hair

tasting: coffe and milk, apple, granola bar, bread, grapefruit salad, hunger for more life

love and other good things

2011-02-14T16:19:00.000-07:00

Sunday morning, driving back into the city after a very late night with very dear friends, I watched the sun rise over the lake, this tentative, thin salmon and rose and dusty blue glow reflected in the water out past the white ice and snow rimming the shore. I'd slept for just three hours, curled up on a loveseat, and I was drinking coffee and eating coffee cake and chatting intermittently with Josh, and I realized that I was alive. Alive. Alive to friends and a sunrise over a city, with its impossible mix of concrete and green life, agony and glory, highrises and cockroaches. I was on my way to worship with as lovely a crew of human beings as I could imagine. We were on our way from somewhere beautiful, heading somewhere beautiful, and the sun was rising over all of it, and I felt sure that I knew love.

Last year at this time, I had just completed my doctoral exams. The first week of February 2010, I completed my written exams, and Monday, 8 February, I sat at a conference table in the department library for my oral defense. I knew love last year, too: a week of meals arranged my friends, delivered to my door, during my last week of exam preparation. I think the beginning of February will always be a time for me to remember this story of love, manifested in veggie lasagna (from E and S), cheesy broccoli pasta (from A and R), pizza (from P and L), stir-fry (from K), stuffed winter squash (from A), stuffed peppers (from N), and tea (from K). Remembering these flavors is like looking back at a Valentine.

Today, I reflect on love, emblazoned like a gift from heaven across the early Sunday sky, mingled in the sounds of friends' late-night voices, giving off steam as it sits on my dining room table. I reflect on the quiet, domestic love of laundry sitting already-folded in the bedroom when I go to fold it, the box of candy at my place at the breakfast table, the long hug in the kitchen before Josh had to take himself off to work, and the simple--but really, very complicated--promise of a whole future spent together.

People like to quote 1 Corinthians 13 for Valentine's Day--love is patient, kind, etc.--and I find it beautiful and challenging, and I believe it is true. Because I was responsible for a sermon on the second chapter of 1 Corinthians a few weeks ago, though, I've recently done some reading on the book. I think it's interesting to remember that 1 Corinthians was originally part of a letter--not even its own separate chapter, just one thought in a long and somewhat rambling note--to a troubled church in the Roman colonial city of Corinth. The apostle Paul wrote the believers a letter in response to their troubles as a community plagued by conflict and competition over leadership, theology and philosophy, sexual and gender norms, food ethics, social disparities, styles of worship, beliefs about the future, jockeying for position and respect. The message of this letter as a whole is one of unity and love: not just in romantic relationships, or sentimental cozy feelings, but across the community in profoundly tangible ways. The sort of love Paul describes in 1 Corinthians is the deep and impossible and essential source for any true justice, any true peace, any healthy manifestation of the beautifully diverse yet unified beloved community.

The senior high Sunday school class I teach has been looking at some hard questions about faith, and the one we've been working on recently is Why are there (and why have there been in history) so many angry, violent, aggressive, mean Christians, and what should we do about it, and what does it have to do with our faith? (So we're taking on the Crusades, and witch burnings, and abortion clinic bombings, and anti-gay protests at military funerals.) These aren't easy questions.

But they have led me today to think about what it means not just to love neighbor but also to love enemy, to love the other. Does my deep sense of joy and appreciation for the Creator's love I recognize in the world's beauty, the love I receive from and give to my friends, the love I share with my husband, the love I recognize in the death-and-resurrection story of my faith, teach me something about loving those who are different from me? Do these experiences of love empower me to love those who haven't shown me love, and who may not love me back? Does this love I know embolden me to choose to love and serve rather than to simply seek my own best interest, see the world only through my own experiences, elbow my way to getting what I want or proving that I'm right? What sort of Valentine do I offer to the world with my life each day?

five-sense Friday

2011-02-11T09:37:00.000-07:00

This week has been a study in contrasts. I have been...

seeing: massive snowflakes, broad as Turkish coffee cups, earlier in the week, dancing outside the window; this morning, the flakes are tiny, like little pin-points of white

hearing: the quiet of library study during the days; the raised mingling of friends' voices at night

smelling: very little in general, with a stuffy nose; and at points, the glow of lemon bread baking in the oven, or the early morning promise of a day

tasting: brown rice and baked vegetables last night, simple fare; but also lovely cakes and cookies and pastries and cheeses at various events

feeling: bone-deep cold outdoors, and then enveloping warmth indoors: repeated, and repeated, and repeated.

just finished: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

2011-02-05T20:21:00.000-07:00

This week, I finished this lovely book. I'm a bit behind on the bandwagon, but I'm glad I finally got around to it: finishing Animal, Vegetable, Miracle left me feeling challenged and alive and hopeful.

The book is Kingsolver's account of a year's experiment in local eating. She, along with her husband and two daughters, set out to fully occupy their Virginia land, gardening and raising animals, canning and freezing, cooking from scratch, and purchasing what they could not make (with a few exceptions) from sources as nearby as possible. It's a beautifully written narrative, combining experience and research. Kingsolver's husband Steven Hopp provides succinct (and sometimes zingy) sidebars on the politics and science of U.S. food economics, and her daughter Camille ends many of the chapters with a young person's perspective and suggested recipes.

This is the sort of book that makes me long for a bit of land, a laundry line, a nice wide pantry, a chest freezer. Its compelling writing and solid argumentation leave me wondering how most of us continue to deceive ourselves that our participation in widespread profit-driven food practices has no lasting negative effects. The book doesn't browbeat, but it certainly leaves me with a heavy sense of my responsibility--our responsibility--as well as our possibilities. Does our attachment to convenient, out-of-season, processed, cheap foods in the U.S. damage our own health, the health of soil, the health of local economies (in the States and across the globe), the health of global economies, the health of vulnerable migrant workers, and the health of the planet--thus the health of our children and theirs? Absolutely. Are we all free to up and leave our urban or suburban lives to go claim a bit of homestead? Not really. But are there things we can do? Absolutely.

My takeaway, at a time of year when snowy winds howl outside my third-floor windows, and I can't exactly take up container gardening on my back fire escape or visit a bustling farmers market, is that I absolutely can

(1) seek to purchase foods from local sources (the Illinois or Wisconsin dairy products, the Michigan apples, bread from the local bakery instead of Target, even the canned goods processed nearby)
(2) seek to purchase foods that have been minimally processed (as these require the least fuel for processing and delivery) -- dried beans rather than canned, for instance
(3) seek to purchase well-raised meats (which means, of course, that J and I eat far less of it on our limited budget--but we've been headed in this direction for a long time anyway).

During the summer, our options are broader: last year we participated in a CSA program, as well as a bit of back porch gardening (our most successful endeavor was basil, though we've had a some success with lettuce). Our neighborhood also now offers a Sunday farmers' market during the warmer months.

The morning I finished the book, before the impending snow storm, I snow-booted my way over to the market for a few things: cabbage, carrots, parsnips, beets, onions, potatoes. I was proud of my choices of (mostly) cold-weather storage crops, all set to cook for the next few days. I practically patted myself on the back for passing up bananas, pineapples, and tomatoes.

But then, as I surveyed the produce section, my gaze was arrested by a woman whose caramel hands caressed first one avocado, gently pressing its pebbly skin, and then another. This woman knew her avocados. This woman was not from the blizzardy Midwestern United States: she was from somewhere further south, somewhere nearer the equator and the sun. An avocado in her hand whispered home. It meant grandmothers' recipes and good memories and delicious soft familiarity.

One of Kingsolver's strong points in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is the importance of food culture linked to a particular place and people, the weather and land, the seasons and crops, the culture and life. She delivers a biting (and I think fair) critique of U.S. food culture as fast, convenient, and fake. Because we are a nation made up, in large part, of transplanted people, we have pockets of transplanted food culture (Italian, for instance, or Mexican), but very few strong and lasting traditions based on particular places in the U.S. Shouldn't what one eats and how one cooks in Michigan be different from what one eats and how one cooks in southern California? (It really doesn't help that we displaced and decimated those who had established food traditions related to these lands when we colonized them.)

I feel compelled, as the great-great-granddaughter of Polish and German and who-knows-what-all-else immigrants, as a woman with the privilege and leisure to research food sources and recipes, as a follower along a Way of peace and justice, to take responsibility--to whatever extent I can--for my participation in the messed up systems of eating and agriculture in the United States. I must follow my conscience with my meal planning, my grocery bags, and my wallet. But can I judge the immigrant who preserves her own food culture, her sense of identity and home, with goods transported from who-knows-where and grown under who-knows-what conditions? Can I raise my eyebrows at the refugee for whom vegetables from another hemisphere signify life and hope?

I cannot.

These are complicated issues, and complex questions, and long-distance produce transports are hardly the only question here. But as I've written about before, what about the extra time it takes to cook from scratch, or garden, or preserve food? How feasible is the move to increase our domestic labor loads within present social structures, and what other injustices might come about as a result (particularly gender work imbalance)? What thoughts do you, dear readers, have on these topics? What choices do you feel good about? What tips or resources can you recommend?

five-sense Friday

2011-02-04T08:37:00.000-07:00

Good morning, blue-skied cold! Today I am...

seeing: frost patterns on the storm windows, like a magical forest of jewels

hearing: music, chirping birds in the alley (!!!), my own fingers tapping at keys

feeling: the strange tickle before sneezes (over and over again); the chill creeping from exterior walls toward the centers of the rooms

smelling: vanilla candle, rising pizza dough

tasting: green chai, pecan granola, green chai

five-sense Friday

2011-01-28T16:32:00.000-07:00

My baby brother has chastised me for my blogging hiatus, but I blame it on two weekends away at camp and the fact that I am--actually, honestly--trying to write a dissertation. Also, I need to publish some things in venues I can put on a resume...this lovely blog only goes so far, you know?

But here I am with a report on the world's beauty today: it was an A plus beauty day in which I...

smelled: crispish winter air, and the baking of muffins with their sweet and floury alchemy

tasted: said muffins, studded with blueberries or granola, and also a gigantic yellow delicious apple that was both yellow and delicious in the tenderest of ways

saw: the whitest snow in twilight's fading, and friends

felt: the heat of dishwater on my winter-rough hands, the soothing slipperiness of lotion, the warmth of a woolen hat over my ears

heard: voices and wisdom, questions and laughter, and a young man with an immigrant's lilt thanking me for moving over on the sidewalk so he and his father could pass by

five-sense Friday

2011-01-07T12:12:00.000-07:00

Back again!

seeing: snow-cloudy sky and a Very Long dissertation chapter draft

hearing: Josh tumbling cans into the recycling bags

smelling: citrus and cinnamon

tasting: black tea, white tea, coffee (soon!), marvelous granola, and later: cookies!

feeling: chill on my toes and the panic/satisfaction/panic that comes near the end of a writing project

my take on Voyage of the Dawn Treader

2010-12-29T16:12:00.001-07:00

I love going to movies; it's such an event, based in a place, not like popping library DVDs into my laptop. Of course, this drawn-out student life and budget and schedule means I go to probably three films a year, if that, and often when I'm visiting my parents. Josh and I put in a special request that we see The Chronicles of Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader while we were with them last week, and so we did.

I had heard mixed reviews. I'd read this review by Andrew O'Hehir on Salon.com, which presents the film as not terribly good and strangely purposeful in its spiritual overtones. But then I'd had conversations with a few friends who found it absolutely beautiful and just plain fun. What I saw in the theater was a fast-paced action story, much more focused on self-acceptance than the book and also much more plot-based than the meandering tale. Did I cry when Reepicheep went to Aslan's country? Maybe. Did I love the lion when he showed up? Of course.

I had a strange sense that something was missing but couldn't put my finger on it (I blame my terrible memory) until Josh pointed it out. I'm sure I'm not the first person to ask this, but where is the lamb?

After all the struggles and wandering of Voyage of the Dawn Treader, when Lucy and friends make their way to the End of the World, they drift east on the Last Sea of lilies and watch on the third day as the sun dawns unbearably bright and beautiful. They see the tall wave, and they know that Aslan's country lies beyond it. But what they find on the beach is not a lion, as in the film, but a Lamb:

     "Come and have breakfast," said the Lamb in its sweet milky voice.
     Then they noticed for the first time that there was a fire lit on the grass and fish roasting on it. They sat down and ate the fish, hungry now for the first time for many days. And it was the most delicious food they had ever tasted.
     "Please, Lamb," said Lucy, "is this the way to Aslan's country?"
     "Not for you," said the Lamb. "For you the door to Aslan's country is from your own world."
     "What!" said Edmund. "Is there a way into Aslan's country from our world too?"
     "There is a way into my country from all the worlds," said the Lamb; but as he spoke his snowy white flushed into tawny gold and his size changed and he was Aslan himself, towering above them and scattering light from his mane.

And then, in the book, the children have the conversation about how they are too old to be returning to Narnia in the future, and Lucy sobs at the thought of never seeing Aslan again.

    "But you shall meet me, dear one," said Aslan.
     "Are--are you there too, Sir?" said Edmund.
     "I am," said Aslan. "But there I have another name. You must learn to know me by that name. This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there."

This last line is quoted in the movie, quite beautifully. But where is the Lamb?

As Josh reminded me, there is another story of a Lamb cooking fish on a beach and inviting his friends to "Come and have breakfast," and it occurs in the Gospel of John, chapter 21. The disciples go out fishing (carrying on with life, even though their leader has recently been crucified), and at daybreak they see a man standing on the shore. They don't recognize him as the Lord, not until after he has performed a familiar miracle, having them cast their nets and catch more fish than they can carry, and then they realize who he is, and that he has a fire going, and fish, and bread, and has made them breakfast.

This beautiful, quiet act--of preparing food for those one loves--is an example of a far greater act of service--of submitting oneself "like a lamb to the slaughter" in a radical subversion of expected divine power, and it is central to my faith and to the imagery of Lewis's book. The brief and unexpected reminder, after a novel full of adventure and even violence, that the Most High is not just a lion but also lamb--this is absolutely key.

I think a lot about the dangers and beauties of a faith story that believes in a powerful God who chooses incarnation, caring service, and humiliating death, and only then resurrection and victory, as a paradigm for salvation. My protestant heritage has instilled in me a deep appreciation for grace and faith, but how does that grace come to us, and in whom precisely are we placing our faith?

Increasingly, I am compelled to remember that my faith is in one who, for mysterious reasons beyond my understanding, abandoned the roar of a lion for the "sweet milky voice" of a lamb, who chose in earthly ministry to heal and feed rather than rouse a powerful following, who, as the old song says, "could have called ten thousand angels / to destroy the world and set him free," but instead willingly suffered death, even death on a cross. And who rose again, who claimed victory over death's power, yet was did not immediately demand recognition and worship but instead walked with some along the road, appeared at a house, showed up on a beach and cooked breakfast for his friends.

We need to remember the lion, too, of course, the glorious dignity and beyondness and protection. He is not a tame lion. But let me just suggest that the choice to excise the lamb from a film like Voyage of the Dawn Treader is not just a choice of simplifying a confusing plot twist; it is political, and it is theological. It relates, I think, to a certain reactionary strand of "muscular Christianity" present in contemporary America, led by those who make infamous claims like, "I cannot worship a guy I can beat up." And this strand of muscular Christianity has a lot to do with power, a lot to do with empire. But it is not representative of the One I seek to follow, and it is not faithful to the picture I see in scripture.

We worship not just a powerful lion who is on our side, but a lamb who often surprises us. Let us stand with awe before the mystery, hold both sides of the paradox in that impossible tension. Let us worship the lion, towering above and scattering light from his mane, but please, please, let's not forget the lamb. "Come and have breakfast," Jesus says in John 21:12, and at that point, even though they hadn't recognized him at first, "None of them dared ask, 'Who are you?' They knew it was the Lord."

on women who are awesome

2010-12-27T18:30:00.001-07:00

This is my mom. Last week she put on some robes (she ironed them first) and fancy cords that indicate her smartness (can anyone pronounce magna cum laude?), and she marched across a stage and shook the appropriate hands and accepted the ceremonial folder and beamed her way down the ramp and back to her seat. Her seat happened to be between two very tall young men who could have been her children. Come to think of it, most of her classes have also had her sitting between people who could have been her children. In fact, these past few years she attended the same college as her youngest children, and at the same time.

My mom is now one of a not-so-long history of women who have made it into and through the rigors of higher education and come out with a bachelor's degree (such a funny name for a degree, such a holdover from earlier days). She has done her homework and written her papers and studied for exams between full-time jobs (the job that she drove to, which brought in a pay check, and the job of keeping a home, which did not), cooking fabulous meals, caring for young adult children, serving at her church, and keeping up with her family. She has highlighted lecture notes and wrapped birthday gifts and prepared I-can't-even-imagine-how-many Sunday roasts. She has cared for her mother, and lost her mother, and forged ahead, forged ahead through numerous crises and challenges among family and friends, stuck with it, and--thirty years after she started taking classes, and after the long pause that my own birth began, and after many years of one- or two-class semesters, she has achieved her degree. And now she is applying for graduate programs.

I am this woman's daughter. Her feminism wasn't loud and angry (and she wouldn't have even called it feminism, especially not in her fundamentalist Christian context), but a quiet assumption of the implicit value and intelligence of little girls as well as little boys (even when, as in my case, the little girls' brothers scored higher in the IQ tests!). Her devotion to education wasn't pushy or pressuring, never about checking our homework or agonizing over grades, but it manifested in frequent trips to the public library, limited television time, support for creative endeavors, and insistence on keeping us in good schools. She poured herself out for her children and husband, teaching and coaching and encouraging us all. And when the time came, she returned to school herself, delighting in her sharpened number two pencils and her notebook paper. My mom is a learner as well as a teacher, and this has made me a learner, has formed a great deal of who I am.

She graduated With Great Honor last week, but I just have to say: getting to call this particular woman Mom, it seems somehow that the honor is all mine.

just finished: The Wisdom of Stability

2010-12-14T07:33:00.001-07:00

I saw this book on the shelf when Josh took me to visit his seminary last week, and I'll be honest about the appeal: it was all the cover. I have a thing for trees. So I judged this book by its designer and had Josh check it out for me. The one constraint was that today is his last day of finals, so I needed to finish it in time for him to take it back to campus.

I did. It wasn't hard: the book is fairly short, fairly simple. Its basic premise is that in a hypermobile culture, choosing to stay put in a place and pay attention to it may be a radically good move. Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, a key voice in the New Monastic Movement, looks to the long tradition of Christian monasticism--the desert mothers and fathers, the Benedictines, and other orders--for wisdom about the joys and challenges of committing to a place and a people, and so the book is full of the sayings and stories of sages.

Kathleen Norris provided the foreword for the book, which makes perfect sense based on her own history of involvement in monasticism as a Benedictine oblate and her career of writing (quite beautifully) about the insights she's gained from the tradition. The danger, of course, is that this foreword set me up to make some comparisons, which isn't quite fair. Whereas Norris's books have the rhythm and depth of a mature writer's attention, The Wisdom of Stability is the sort of book a young man writes not because he's a devoted writer but because his experience has given him something to say. The researched chapters of the book develop the argument that our culture is desperate for lessons in stability and that the monastic tradition can provide this wisdom, and here the argument isn't terribly vigorous. But the book shines when Wilson-Hartgrove narrates his own experiences in concrete terms and reflects on them in all their complexity.

The other strength of this slim volume, to my mind, is its barely developed but seriously provocative assertion that staying put and paying attention are central counter-culture practices. I have been thinking a lot recently about attention, that near-impossible and absolutely necessary gift the philosopher Simone Weil famously describes in her book Waiting for God. It seems to me that our technologically- and market-driven culture is quickly losing whatever small capacity it had for paying attention in the past, so that a renewed awareness of this practice is essential for communities devoted to life rather than death. More on that another time.

Ultimately, I recommend The Wisdom of Stability to those of you who haven't yet read Kathleen Norris, to anyone who is contemplating the insane tempo and movement of our culture as possibly detrimental, and to those of you intrigued by the New Monasticism. This is a good place to start.

things I loved about yesterday

2010-12-11T07:00:00.001-07:00

1. meeting Josh for lunch and seeing three different friends from three different contexts in the space of half an hour

2. the man with the bouquet wrapped in green tissue paper buzzing at an apartment door, smiling and half catching my smile

3. the bows tied on another house's fenceposts

4. watching undergrads in ponytails cram for their finals and say to each other, "You'll be fine"

5. peppermint green tea, warm tumblers, sweeping all the salt away and cozying into home

five-sense Friday

2010-12-10T08:35:00.000-07:00

Photo credit: my dad.

Friday already, and well into December, and I am amazed at the quickness and the snow. Recently I've been...

seeing: white sparkle snow, ice, snow; the wonderful tradition in my neighborhood of wrapping red Christmas ribbons through fences; lots of books

hearing: the radio (classical) and an J's indie Christmas playlist; also his paper typing; also library near-silence and the sound of my own pen scratching notebook paper

feeling: cold warm cold warm cold warm, and the joy of my Montana Woolens hat

tasting: lots of hot cocoa, tea, and coffee, plus lots of fruit

smelling: if you ever head to the north side of Chicago and stand on the corner of Clark Street and Lunt around 6:00 p.m., you will smell the joy of sweet frying dough, thanks to a Dunkin Donuts and two Mexican pastry shops within a block. I have been sniffing that, with deep appreciation.

snow!

2010-12-04T08:55:00.000-07:00

I woke this morning to a certain white glow through the curtains--I knew that glow. Ran to the living room, opened the blinds, craned my neck to see the ground three stories down: snow!

It falls, or rather, it dances in the air currents of our courtyard, and coats the world in white. Welcome, December. Welcome, winter. Welcome, beauty in the darkest month of the year, you giver-of-reflected-light, you chilly wonder.

five-sense Friday

2010-12-03T07:04:00.000-07:00

And we're back to life as usual. I've only been up for a while, but so far today I've been...

smelling: fresh laundry as I fold it; caramel infused coffee as it brews

hearing: a winter weather advisory on the radio? really?

seeing: the thin, white December light through the steamed-up storm windows

feeling: warm radiators radiating, warm coffee mug coffeeing

tasting: green toothpaste with polka dots in it; coffee; and about to go eat some maple-walnut granola

gratitude project: 30.11.10

2010-11-30T11:04:00.000-07:00

My gratitude project is done for this year, although of course the practice of gratitude will be sticking with me. If you haven't already, check out my friend Sarah's Thankful Thursdays from the month of November (also check in for her Five Sense Fridays). And do leave a comment here letting me know what you've found yourself most grateful for during this past month.

gratitude project: 26-29.11.10

2010-11-30T11:01:00.000-07:00

gratitude project: 25.11.10

2010-11-30T11:00:00.000-07:00

gratitude project: 24.11.10

2010-11-30T10:55:00.000-07:00

gratitude project: 23.11.10

2010-11-23T07:20:00.000-07:00

gratitude project: 22.11.10

2010-11-22T12:28:00.000-07:00

gratitude project: 21.11.10

2010-11-21T12:26:00.001-07:00

gratitude project: 20.11.10

2010-11-20T16:49:00.000-07:00

No scan today, but a few thoughts (and I hope those of you who follow this know you can click on the photos for larger versions -- please don't try to read the little ones; you'll strain your pretty eyes).

The days deepen into their darkness earlier and earlier as November progresses, and it feels more deeply dark to me this year. Afternoons give up their glow to evenings, and night seems to be taking over. I switch on lamps, light candles, cook warm food, listen to good music.

It has occurred to me, in this time of shortening days and impending chill, that my gratitude project my seem a bit glib if taken out of context. Three things! I'm thankful for! In colored pen! Won't you list some, too! Oh, the world is happy, and I am glad! Let's twirl!

This is hardly the all of it. The sun's vacation to the southern hemisphere, the cold and dark, is a fitting metaphor for some of life right now: people who I love are hurting, wounded, breaking, healing, struggling to keep the scraps of life together. I, being human, have some not-insignificant pains and concerns of my own. And I need hardly comment on the structural injustices that plague us. This is the space out of which my gratitude project has grown, following the advice of a friend who suggested years ago that during hard times, writing down three things for which one is thankful at the end of each day can be a life-giving practice, a light-giving practice, an illuminating shift of perspective that perhaps highlights the next step or two. It is project of radical hope, which as Adrienne Rich reminds us, is utterly necessary if we are to have the creative capacity to imagine a way out of the suffering we're also responsible to acknowledge.

The mystery of beauty and pain, sorrow and joy, darkness and light, their mingling and oppositions and negations, seems daunting at times, but I recognize engaging it as my life's project--as a writer, as a scholar-activist, as a friend, as a person of faith. Just now, you're only getting one half of the equation, but know that there is more. There is always more.