I have nothing to say

My feet take me places and my fingers forget to follow: it's as if life, in all it's vacuous chaos, has drained the words right from me with nothing left to put down in black and white. A writer's life has seasons as any artist's does: sometimes life inspires you and you record your perceptions in your own unique voice; then, too, the magnitude of the visual expanse of our world stops us up with it's enormity and no words are adequate to describe it.

My camera is dusty, too. A recent thrift store acquisition of a Yashica medium format SLR camera with a ground glass lens, and an original Canon Super8 video camera have left digital media far behind. I stood in a St. Louis hotel suite a few weeks ago stopped up by the chair they had left for me, the symmetry of it in the lance of light through the crack in the drapes, but more so the fact that I had four days alone in the anonymity of a fancy hotel, with THIS chair to sit in and look out on the urban landscape.

There were other moments of happiness captured: green grass in March under shiny new gray oxfords. An Ethiopian restaurant where I ate mounds of spicy lamb curry with hot from the oven injera. I was on my way to get a new tattoo: something I do when the pain of the past threatens to swallow me whole. I call it alternate rebellion. My brain is sending me on impulsive journeys to places I no longer want to visit, and pain is what stops me in my tracks. No longing wielding weapons against my own body, ironically it is healthier to hand a stranger a hundred and sit for an hour while they stab my skin with a high speed needle and paint.

I rented a car and when my mind began to wander to the sadness and stress of my everyday life, I hopped in and drove fast on the highways to a totally different part of the city. I travel to old St. Louis, which everyone tells me to avoid. I'm not very good at listening to warnings when I'm on an adventure. Especially by myself. So I take pictures of the boarded up old French row houses in the slums; I find a huge stone column, some remnant of a majestic building from the French period - now standing testament to a long-gone era, right in the middle of a road with a round-about built to avoid it. I drink espresso and eat beignets at a bakery advertising "hot and fresh". The windows boast iron bars to deter break-ins, and the inside is dingy and old with cracked linoleum underfoot and wobbly oak tables and chairs. There is a dusting of sugar on everything I touch. The beignets are roasting hot, the sugar melting into the crust. They're the best I've ever eaten. The "espresso" is Southern style - made from fine ground chicory and coffee.

Flowers are just beginning to bloom and I pick a magnolia blossom and set it on my dash. All this beauty in a four day business trip. I breathe deep and think I am lucky - for that is what it is, not a blessing or some experience designed to delight me, but just luck. The worst days of my life have occurred over these same weeks of silence, and it is only by building happy moments into bitterly difficult days that I thrive in no-man's land in a battle I stumbled upon.

The tattoo is my largest yet. I choose my left leg, I choose symbols carefully for their meanings in this season. The top is an enso, a mark that symbolizes an unfinished volume or chapter: it is for strength and for the void that coexists with our universe. Below it, I ask for a colorful eban, a West African symbol that is painted on the fences of small towns vulnerable to pillaging, attack, and other unspeakable violence. It represents the strong fence protecting the village: security and safety for all within it's walls. The diamonds are homes, and the colors all mean something that speaks peace into my situation: black is for warriors; green is for the ability to provide; red is for the deep attachment between the community or family members; and yellow means the space is precious and beautiful to it's inhabitants. The two "e" symbols mean something to me as well. It is a bold move for a bold time, marking a new step in my transformation, a step toward maturity, self-sufficiency, and - perhaps most important - my newly brave and powerful voice.

I return to winter and to adventures with my kidlets. We go to the American Girl store and I am surprised to enjoy it, such a girly place. In just the past year, femininity has been both something I can ignore or choose depending on how I feel, and also it is no longer dangerous. Instead it feels peaceful and joyful and expressive. Watching my girls and niece dance around the store in giddy delight over all the dolls reminds me of the countless hours I spent playing with my baby dolls all alone, dreaming of babies and a home to call my own someday. That desire seemed antithetical to my tomboy nature and my fear of marriage. Things work out differently than we imagine in our heads.

As I write here less, I have sometimes felt a twinge of guilt. But this blog is simply my story. Some seasons have required many lines typed to cipher through all the thoughts in my head. I have less to interpret these days, living authentically instead of in a cage of expectations. So the blog rests for weeks on end while I am busy living.

Which is the best possible development on a blog that has chronicled cancer and illness and loss and grief and shame. Join me in quietly celebrating by simply living the life you were designed to live.

The many roads it took to get here

One day long ago I dreamed of being a travel nurse. We were just wed, two nurses, we had adoption paperwork in process and we dreamed of apartments in far away cities; burn and trauma units, children laying in beds under those city lights waiting for our hands, our hearts.

I was up in a deer stand in Minnesota when I felt the Spirit's nudge. I prayed for our first child, whoever he or she was, prayed a long list of dreams and hopes and fears. Six weeks later, I stared down at a miraculously positive pregnancy test. It was the second I'd seen this in 3 months, me with the undeveloped eggs and the atrophied Fallopian tubes and the low hormone levels. I, the infertile myrtle. My husband with the similar diagnosis. How could we conceive twice in 3 months of marriage? Would this baby disappear into the dark shadows of the ultrasound screen like the first had? I turned around to face the toilet, and vomited bile.

We chose the spot, we dug the hole

We laid the maples in the ground to have and hold

As Autumn falls to Winters sleep

We pray that somehow in the Spring

The roots grow deep

And many years from now

Long after we are gone

These trees will spread their branches out

And bless the dawn

~from Planting Trees, Andrew Peterson~

There was no disappearing, and my first baby emerged from my body 2 weeks late and shocking in her awareness and hunger. She pushed up on her tiny fists while lying on her father's chest that first night, her eyes wide and black, as if she were memorizing every detail of his features. In that instant, every dream I'd ever had disappeared into the hormonal mist and this babe became the entirety of my world.

A brief 18 months later, she was toddling and captivating everyone with her adult vocabulary, starting almost all her sentences with "Actually..." And on a cold and bright March afternoon, her sister arrived black-haired and rosy-lipped. I would look at them, sleeping together in the afternoon, their heads sweaty and covered in curls, and they were at once totally foreign and wholly familiar. 

The third and fourth came just as quickly. We had grown used to the fact that the doctors were wrong, and we would produce children by the grace of God, and our world revolved around them, the diapers, the nursing, the bonds like iron bands holding the barrel of our family tighter than any dreams could have.

But I still dreamed. The microscopic visions of motherhood burned my eyes by then, and I squeezed them shut and imagined telescopes into the universe and periscopes up from the underwater grave of home. 

I could hear the highway song

I dreamed that I was

A world traveler

Set me loose to find my way

Just get me out on the road someday

With my sails unfurled

So many mysteries

I wanted to unravel

If I could travel the world

~World Traveler, Andrew Peterson~

I was on two roads, one part of me home with my children and the other on a highway of longing for grand adventure. The distant cities still glittered in my imagination. The mystery was this tether in my heart, the tangle of four of the "least of these" planted right in the very fibers of my being.

Night is falling on a foreign sky

And distant cities are breathing out 

The lights, tangled on a long thin line

Like diamonds shattered on the ground

And the lights call out from distant cities

You come alive, like a melody

And you shine you shine, brighter than a new day

And I sing along, into the mystery

As the lights call out from distant cities

The tears, filling up my empty eyes

Pour like shadows on the ground

What found me here spreads across a million miles

Breaks the gallows, lifts the shroud

As the lights call out

~Bebo Norman~

I was looking for emotional reasons to link me to the life God had given me. But what lay before me was choices, a million tiny decisions. I learned, in that season struggling to stay home,while forcing myself, teeth gritted tight, to keep my focus square on the life God had blessed me with, was the call-and-response of living for Jesus. He calls, yes - but that call is not always an explosion of brilliance that triggers a tidal wave of love from my heart to His. Sometimes it was just a tiny whisper behind me, "This is the way. Walk in it." My response was not often a heart on fire, but simply a soul willing to put the next footstep down on the path He'd laid before me.

As I kept walking forward on what seemed like a dimly lit, poorly marked path, the emotions followed. The heart follows the mind sometimes. The tidal wave of love I heard about in worship songs and testimonies wasn't my experience. It was a soft turning, a quiet and gentle creeping up in the throat. 

Now the world turns again, and dreams and duties co-exist. I am no longer on a divided highway, pulled between east and west. As surely as I kept stepping forward, He bridged the gap between the desires of my heart and the portion of my life.

If you'll step inside this great glass elevator

It'll take us up above the city lights

To where the planet curves away to the equator

I want to show you something fine

You can see the roads that we all traveled just to get here

A million minuscule decisions in a line

Why they brought us to this moment isn't clear

Could it be that the many roads

You took to get here

Were just for me to tell this story

And for you to hear this song

And your many hopes

And your many fears

Were meant to bring you here all along

How I love to watch you listen to the music

'Cause you sing to me a music of your own

As I cast out all these lines, so afraid that I will find

I am alone, all alone

Could it be that the many roads

I took to get here

Were just for you to tell that story

And for me to hear that song

And my many hopes

And my many fears

Were meant to bring me here all along

We were meant to be right here all along

~Many Roads, Andrew Peterson~

Is there a disconnect between your dreams and your reality? Do you struggle to hear and respond to God's call in your life? Have courage, and take the next step. Someday, like me, you will step into the clearing and that crooked path behind you will be but a memory, for a time.


Photos today from the irrepressible Amelia.

When gratitude comes slowly

The e-mail comes from Bonnie, and the topic for today is gratitude. It comes to me on a day when trouble boils up at my brand new job, a day when my mother is able to go with an old friend from church and I realize that they are all gone, every single friend still at that church, beloved people I miss so much. It comes to me on a day when I struggle to enjoy hockey, my legs like jelly and muscles pulling as I drag goalie equipment around for the first time since babies. It comes to me on a day when I simply feel like an outsider, and I wonder where I'll find community. Perhaps at the ice rink? 

I think about the paradox of I John 2:15: Do not love the world or the things of this world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in Him. Yet the New Testament also constantly exhorts us to love the people of this world, to reach out to them, to lavish love upon them, to bless them and draw them to Christ's all-surpassing love. There is an unmistakable inner craving that constantly dogs me, to find a home here, a place where I can love and be loved. For what Christian is a stranger among Christians?

My mind always settles on the picture of my closed baby fists, gripping this world tight, unbendingly. As we slowly grow old, our hands open, until they are flat on our deathbed, no grip remaining, no tie to this world, ready for the next. This is a painful process, the breaking of the grip, the loosing of the anchor lines. But just like a great oceanliner held down by ropes and cables, only the tide of God's ocean of grace is necessary to pull us away from the dock, break the chains that bind, and leave us forever adrift on the waves of His mercy.

For this, and the binding of my soul inexorably to my home and family, I am grateful. I am ready to leave whenever He calls, but understand that for now, His call is toward my husband, children, the healing of us all so we can go out on the mission we crave. For each and every small joy of each and every day, I am grateful. He has brought me through the refiner's fire, and it is with a glad face I look upon the trials coming tomorrow, for I know that He is shaping me, molding me, and loving me through the best of times and the worst.