Softly, Softly

I want a vacation where I roll out of bed before the morning soft gets burned away, just because it feels nice to sit and watch the sun play outside my window. Footsteps down the hall and a hand that brushes across my shoulder remind me that I'm the right kind of alone--safe and solitary, without obligation to the whims and whiles of a hundred someone elses. Not today. The room is cinnamon and mint and cheerfully greets the holiday season, and for once I'm not grouchy or hungover from the spirits of Christmas. Instead, I think and I write what I think and my mind unlocks the depths of my soul. I go there. And it's a good place to go. I'm with the me that I love and she is so beautiful and so pure. I'm the potential that God sees. In being, I change the entire course of history.

Lately I've been feeling down because I had finally reached the top in record speed only to find that it wasn't quite as high as I wanted, and now there's no where else to go. I'm too restless to spend 60 more years like this--where the peak suffocates like underground and everything goes dim and fuzzy and the cold is the bad kind of cold.

It's time to fly away on a new song
To dance the steps that will carry me off
To dream a lost dream.
It's time to melt the tears that hardened around my heart
To let them cry out of my eyes again
To warm a better warm.
It's time to embrace a softer season.

I saw a baby and his hands were so small--hands that reached for the me that I lost. I smiled at his smile, and I heard her heart start to beat again. Now the Lost Me controls the radio in my car, listening to the sappy songs because she actually knows what they mean. New feelings course through my veins as the Lost Me takes the steering wheel too. My heart starts to ache with that new something that I'm afraid to put a name to...that thing I won't call love until the years make it safe to look back on. It's miserably optimistic, I know, but it's also very, very good.

He's getting in and I'm going soft. But it's the good kind of soft. A breeze blows and it's pine.

What retard decided that side hugs were a good idea?!

I talk to my dad like it's my job.

So of course last Sunday as I was sorting through some emotional whatnot, I called my favorite source of wisdom. Just like I used to do at 2 am on a rough day back in high school, I explained to my daddy what's going on and waited for some "here's what you should do."

Of course now that I'm getting older, his dos and don'ts are getting grayer, and even though I asked him to make some phone calls and arrange everything for me, his response was something more to chew on than to put into direct action. It was, in fact, the wise thing to do--to point me back to truth and encourage me to trust God--even if it wasn't what I wanted to hear. I'm sure he knows better than I do that fixing my problems for me isn't the best plan of attack.

Justine's car battery died a couple of days ago. Then someone hit my car while it was parked. Justine's dad told us that everything happens in threes, so we waited patiently for some other disaster...

So after Jenny told me the same thing my dad said, I waited for round three, which came via a gchat conversation..

"I feel like we've lost innocence or something, if we're trying to be closed off. what are we afraid of? ..and is it really living if you don't take any risks?"
I'm starting to realize this about myself (not a moment to soon?)--that I'm really cold and hardened when it comes to relationships--and I'm pretty sure that's not how it was meant to be. I can remember a time when I dreamed of meeting a guy who would tell me that I was worth risking for. Back in middle school, when I first formed my beliefs about love, the scariest of risks you could take would be to ask out that girl you'd been pining over for the entire school year. You never knew if she liked you because you never actually had the guts to talk to her, per say, but there was that one time that she tagged you out during a game of kickball and her eyes lingered for an extra moment as you dusted the attempted home run slide off your pants. How I dreamed that one day one of the popular guys would come up to me after school to say that he'd secretly liked me and couldn't live another day if he didn't at least try to make me his girlfriend.

In a movie when someone stands outside your window with a boom box, throwing pebbles at the glass in hopes of catching your attention so as to express his undying love, it's cute. In real life, we call him a stalker and wonder who actually still owns boom boxes these days...

Nowadays, my middle school daydreams about romance seem barely short of barfy. I am a rational, independent, 21st century woman who needs nothing (because I can find it all within myself) and wants nothing (because if I did, I would have gotten it by now). But then I think...as women, didn't God make us to be the soft ones? Not that women should be carbon copies of some sappy stereotype, but God did give each of us a unique personality that uniquely expresses His characteristics as Comforter, Counselor and Friend. We were created to feel emotion, to help and heal others as we fight through life together. But if we stay closed up and unemotional, we will only starve ourselves and rob others of the joys and blessings that can only come from intimate relational connection.

Which in so many words is what I think my dad was trying to get at when he said that it is probably good for me to go through this situation...to allow myself to be softened again.

So even though it seems better in this culture to be closed off, maybe what trusting God really means is renouncing the norm to allow ourselves to feel again. Because even if we get hurt, God is going to take care of us. And with all the promised positives that come through relational intimacy, maybe it is worth the risk.

It was never a question anyway of whose hands would catch you when you fall.

Rachel Ray Drinking Game

Drink every time she mentions the mountains or apples.

And you really don't need anything else on the list if you want to avoid hospitalization.

Lovin' and Leavin'

Isn't it weird when you can look back to some nondescript time in your past and think, "Wow...if someone had told me then that I'd end up here....I would have never believed them." It's even weirder when that moment in your past is just barely a week ago.

Perhaps because I'm no longer the open, vulnerable person that I used to be...or maybe because I've learned the importance of discretion over the years, I won't go into the personal details of this last week and why they've turned my world upside down. I will say, though, that they've got me thinking a lot about love--What is it? Why do we do it? And what does it accomplish?

Scientists say that it all boils down to a bunch of chemical reactions firing in your brain--an essential function of the body that encourages the propagation of the species. Romantics tell us that you can't pick who you fall for while Realists call love a choice. Movies reflect the I-would-die-for-you, lasts-for-always kind of yearning, and Hollywood reminds us that it's easy to bail if you fall out of it and assures that there's no shame in doing so. The Bible weaves the epic story of a perfect love from the Creator to His creation...but even that doesn't seem helpful when I'm trying to pinpoint the concept amongst imperfect humans. Contradiction, much?

Compound it all as I'm trying to decide where to plant my feet next year. I'm committed to this job only through the summer; then I can pick up and go if I want. I thought that choosing a college would be the hardest choice I ever make...because once I picked that course, it would guide me through all the rest. I would go to school, meet someone and fall in love...then the decisions just click into place like so many beads on a summer camp friendship bracelet--one right after the next. You marry the one you love. You move wherever his job takes you. Buy a house. Get settled. Have kids. Alternate between your parents' at major holidays. Send the kids to school. Grow old. Watch everyone else do the same. Step by neat little step.

Turns out, some of us don't go down that yellow brick road, and this next part of the journey has more than lions, tigers, and bears looming in the darkness. My dad told me once that I should just pick something, and as long as I keep following Christ, He'll bless my life wherever I go. Which means that somewhere along the line I have to figure out what it is I want and where I want to be. I liked Plan A because it keeps someone else calling the shots. Fish can follow the river but there's more paths to take on land. (Why do I suddenly hear the pseudo-Caribbean accent of a crab persuading me through song of the benefits of ocean life...?) Melodramatic analogies aside, I thought I had a better grasp on life when I had it partitioned away into steps and formulas. It certainly helped me to deal with all the messy emotions associated with being a girl. But if we scrap the rule-book...does that mean I'm supposed to listen to my heart again? It's been crying wolf for so many years that I don't know which way is up. I've gone from so hot to so cold with so many different guys, and wouldn't have pursued any of the jobs I've had if they hadn't fallen in my lap. I'm constantly cutting and dying my hair, piercing things and buying weird new clothes. Someone so fickle shouldn't lean on herself for support. And after pouring myself out to a few too many people, I learned to turn off the sounds so I wouldn't be such a drama queen. Do I really have to sift back through them again?

Isn't it weird when you look back on the choices you made and realize that so many of them really didn't matter one way or the other?

Busyness and the Real Girl

*Depending on your definition of spoilers, this post may contain them.*

I saw the artsy film, Lars and the Real Girl, the other night with a friend of mine, and I can't seem to get this one scene out of my mind. It's toward the end of the movie, when the sex doll (yeah, check out the trailer) is sick in the hospital, about to die--Lars comes downstairs and three of the prominent old ladies of the town are sitting in the living room, knitting. He's confused as to why they are there when one of them explains, "We're sitting. That's what you do when tragedy strikes." When there's really nothing else you can do in a situation, it's nice to just have people there with you.

As I've been struggling with this idea of family in the midst of the chaos that is life in LA, I can't help but wish that we did a little more sitting. Maybe that's what defines family--family are people that you sit with...someone to come home to at night...and even if all you do is sit there going about your own business, it's nice just to have someone there with you, going about theirs. It seems like everyone is so busy--too busy to get to know the people around them, too busy to pursue families. But if we would just take the time to make those connections, then we'd have someone to sit and be busy with. Busy together is not so bad, but busy alone is...well, I mean, at the end of the day, what do you have? A list of things you've accomplished and no one to share them with. Even if those are all good and godly things...it's still just you and a list. We weren't meant to be alone.

Then I considered all that my hands had done and the toil I had spent in doing it, and again, all was vanity and a chasing after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun.

--Ecclesiastes 2:11