October calls from behind the veil, come and be a person

Today I sat under the porch-awning that hangs over our suite door, on the splintery and wise old barn-wood bench my landlord made, and watched a sheet of rain wash over the cedars. That kind of weighty rain here is so truly rare, and even today it only poured for a few minutes and then returned to the more common spitting kind. But in those minutes I could breathe differently, deeper. 

Today it’s October. 

When I try to think of my “relationship with October” in simple terms, I just feel gratitude that “there is a month that understands me”, haha! But when I ask myself what that means?—it’s harder to parse out into words! 

—October is the joy-struck month I became a Wycliffe member in 2012, after more than an aching decade of hoping to see the day! 

—It’s the month in 2013 when I got to meet my Johnny down in Dallas after we hadn’t seen each other in a breathless few weeks.  In several slow, perfectly ordinary hours, spread out over a week where I was attending a conference during the days and we only had the dinner hours to see each other, my heart could finally have the conversations with itself that it needed to hold.

—It’s when, with a candid pep-talk from my sister over the phone (still in Dallas), I first mustered up the courage to tell Jonathon I loved him; it’s when I first knew for certain that I wanted to marry him, even though we thought that meant he’d be waiting for three years while I went to Papua New Guinea first!

—That same October was when I first met the woman who would become my supervisor and friend in a department I didn't know I'd be working for later. It began the seeds of a story I would later know God had lovingly put together for me, when the work I'd hoped to do would become impossible for me and I would learn in November, through a surprise phone all on the very same day I was hospitalized, that my Lord had been preparing other work for me all along.

—It’s the same month in 2013 that I first started to be sick again, after 4 years of solid remission, with symptoms that seemed to double and re-double in a frenzy through that November until nothing looked as it had before, leaving me in the hospital with no possibility of Papua New Guinea, an almost-zero chance of ever working in a third world country, and no hopes of working in the very physical role of Surveyor that I’d longed for and trained for, and had only been two months away from beginning.

—It is the shining month in 2014 when I married the dearest Jonathon, before God and Heaven, our families, and the fiery oak trees.

So many achingly beautiful highs and chaotic low memories swirl within this month for me—hard seasons before these examples, and other vibrant ones—years of tromping around Berry in autumn months in our 20’s, hay rides and haunted barns with best friends, camping trips and apple orchards, loss and triumph, and now, in British Columbia, sometimes October means unending rain and trees that have stayed quite green, squawking stellar jays, and intermittent moonlit sitings of the tailless racoon…

I love the unkempt metronome of October. It’s a month bursting with visual drama, but also one that fills itself with the beauty of the ordinary—intense storms of gilded colors being transformed into each other, yellow to gold to bleeding red, but always with the calm side-by-side of things turning brown, of common decay.  Nature gets it! In its very fiber it knows that it was made for process; it doesn’t fight or need to endure the weight of grief or change or loss. It doesn’t drown in the sorrow of what we could call a declining beauty (gosh, if a person displayed such highs and lows in a short time we’d be inclined to call it a downward spiral!), but it just knows that this is its way—To buoy with what the year brings, to season in and out, to be seasoned by and through the cyclical song He has written and to know that it is good. And it is then, then that winter is lovely, and spring is awaited, and decay is normal, and all these things are seen and experienced for the good that they were designed to be.

I listened to my footsteps scuff-sideways on the gray pebbles under my canvas shoes this afternoon as I paced beneath our awning, and I could feel the cracking open. It’s been a tough few weeks again with health, and I hear small reminders tapped out in the heart’s morse code…how do you care for the soul when the body keeps trying to fall apart?… How do you connect with everyone on the outside of the health-cyclone when it just won’t stop, and leaves you too thinned and weary to run after them?…tap..tap..  And always the answer is to speak it out. Naming a shadowy thing takes the power out of it.  I am sad over survival mode—because it is not enough—because you can cease to feel like a real person, because it strips the life out of our outsides while our souls itch from the inside, and it tries to clobber you by turning all your time into “catch up” time. I am sad that illness means so much must be left undone, and that in the thick of it, there is only enough energy and ability for only some of the necessary things—which means needed things get left undone, unsaid, unsplendorized when I would long to do it all, to send all the words, to have sent all the cards finally expressing all of the gratitude I FEEL so fully, but have not said with the promptness and physical form that I would want, all the I-miss-yous, all the skype calls, and all the even everyday-normal things that go into making new friendships in the place God has brought the two of us to for now. I am sad that I am only small, and that maybe I am sometimes a thing withering early. I can be scared that things Jonathon and I hope for—like starting a family, finishing degrees, working on a language project together in the future—that these things will slip away from us before we ever get to really roll around in them. I can find worry lurking in my heart that illness will wrap its tentacles around these dream-stars and yank at them before we can choose and step, gleam and grow into them.

Knowing and naming even some of these thoughts and aches helps (and remembering that they are thoughts, and not truths). It doesn’t necessarily fix anything, as there are so many things with chronic illness that you’re just powerless to fix, but it hangs them out like a motley line of laundry, unravels the choked knots, the fabric of me, and helps wearied limbs stretch back out to truth, to hang there in the sun of it and be remade even as the fibers come apart.  Patient endurance is what you need now, Hebrews 10 meters out over my soul, like little hand-scrawled music notes ink-scratched over yellowed parchment, and I know the answer is just that we keep on. 

We breathe, and we inhale the rain, and claim a moment to tiptoe about, to photograph the life around us and to decidedly know that it’s inside too. 

We decide again each day to do as we can and not as we can’t but to do so with all that we’ve got, and to let the false shame of those limitations fall to the earth with the rest of the brown. And we let lovely people and moments remind us to do something small, speak something small, paint or write or shout something small to the feeding of our soul, to the shaking of the trees, and in His mercy we find that He’s written a story where the decay that falls to the ground in this gusty season is food for us all. We are all reborn by its percolation come spring. 

So in this florid season of rushing winds and tempestuous shift, I seek my trunk, my sturdy gnarled and knowing One. He is steadfast, and He is lovely, and illness and process and the forwardness that we were knitted with are all like autumn—where joy and ache are meant to intermingle, and it is the weaving together of the two that makes it what it’s supposed to be—brilliant, fleeting, and always leading into the next season. This mellow cello swoon song, this is what makes me feel understood by October, by my Lamb of a Lord, by my earthly beloved, and by the ones that know me best and plod-twirl through this pile-up crunchy fire-dance alongside me.