Redeeming what could have been "Stranded Friday"

[A Friday morning song I'd love for you to hear (referred to later in this post!)]


I never have trouble understanding that “no man is an island”.

This feels like in-grown knowledge that I’m always certain of, and more often than not, it’s harder for me to handle being in situations that make me feel like one. I don't dislike solitude, and longingly crave it sometimes, but this week has been one of those funny convergences of lots of solitude that just sort of happened by default…  Krissy and Chris have been on vacation, so this big house has been devoid of anyone but me and the Great Companion Scout. I have been working a lot this week too, because everyone in the office is at a conference, and whenever this has happened anytime in the last 3 years, I’ve been the Fort-Holder-Downer for the team…that’s just what we do, and it works wonderfully. 

BUT—It also means that the office has been down to one or two people, and much quieter than usual. THIS much quiet (waking up to it, driving to work in it, rolling in it from 9-5, and returning home to it for a quiet evening) for days and days in a row has historically made me squirrelly, itchy for people and stories, voices and interaction. It's just how God wired me. 

BUT—This week I've found Him beautifully pushing on those wires, and making enough quiet room for me to have space to notice His provision. In the midst of this plan for the Silent Bustle Week, my car broke down. I was running to go meet a dear woman for a we-haven't-done-this-in-TOO-LONG coffee-chat, and it was going to be my reprieve from the first few days of being on my own. "Err-errr-ERrrrrrr" went my little Sentra, and nothing I could do would coax it out of stubborn stuckness. 

BUT—I keep being reminded that His timing is good, even for brokenness.
The breakdown happening this week meant there was a vehicle to borrow, and work has gone on just as it needed to. Such a blessing! I was able to get to the needed, nourishing conversation, wherein we out-night-owled the coffee shop, and I've been able to have the time and solitude in the evenings that I've needed to re-kindle fervent prayer — Prayer about provision and "first world needs" like car repairs, about habits that I want to strengthen in my life that I have time to notice when it gets hushed and still, about awesome decisions that are coming up concerning Papua New Guinea, and the name of a region that I've been asked to pray about working in once I'm initially settled in... 

It is only in solitude that things like this get to roll around my mind and tongue the way they should... In this solitude, my heart readjusts its need to process out loud with someone, and finds itself reminded that Christ knows my voice and wants to hear these things first. He knows the name of this region in PNG and knows every person there. He knows what's wrong with my car and how He will sort out every worry of mine, so much so that He would prefer I let the air out of those worries before I decide it's holy to fill them up and let them fly upward like wind-hoisted balloons...

So this morning was about a joy-filled, weightless, extra-early drive to work in a borrowed car, where my heart found thanks and felicity dribbling out of it (to the tune of the song above!), with the comfortable knowledge that it is well, and that we ought to be singing while we wait to see the surprising, jubilant provision of the Lord. Happy Friday, dearest loved ones. May you feel Him so warmly in your rush or silence today too.

Monday, Monday

It's one of those mornings when the new week has begun but my heart and mind are nestled in Sunday — blind-white sunshine and overlapping islands of picnic blankets from yesterday's good conversations... 

But today is a writing day, a listening to The Innocence Mission and connecting with people day, and so Scout and I welcomed it in with kibble and eggs (respectively), and I am sipping coffee in my favorite, should-be-famous Giraffe Mug.

There is so much to do, but I find this morning that letting in the light has been important and slow. It's been the first day in a long, LONG while, weekends included, that I've just lilted through a morning, twirling between starting laundry, stepping out on a windy porch, finishing my tea and pouring some joe, switching the laundry load, and catching up on the lives of dear friends that also try to capture moments with words on various sites..

So with my sentinel at the window, music in the room, and Replenishment beside me, that so rarely visits on Mondays, I welcome this week.

Mmm,.. So this song and video are beautiful and I wanted to share it, whether this is ever seen by anyone or not.

...And then, of course, there is the hot-coals part of my heart that is simmering and wants to update here so badly... to be able to write about this last year and where I am right now, but knows that this is a loaded, large task... So pray that I can, and know that I will try in the next bit of time to fill in some of the loveliness and turbulence of these anchored, frenzied, quiet months.

Until then, may this tidbit remind you that I love you, family and friends that still peek here~
with all my heart,
mon

March 6, 2009 - Another Experiment

So.. it's one in the morning, and I have just finished an "assignment" that is technically an assignment for my students, but as I think I've mentioned on here before, with creative writing that we ask them to read aloud to the class, my co-teacher and I have promised that we will always write on the topic as well, and come prepared to share what we've written, so it is not just them under a spot-light that's ravaging their confidence, but also us in all our nerdy, adult vulnerability..

It is once again during our unit on the novel The House on Mango Street; just a wonderful little book to teach lyrical/poetic prose with, and to give freshmen a heaving dose of literary devices... So we ask them to write a few vignettes in the style of the author (Sandra Cisneros) and this week's needed to be a treatise on or vivid memory of music in their life.

And here is the bleary teacher's-edition of the mimic-assignment:


There is a silken web that winds itself in and around and under me—shot up my veins like an internal tree running roots down my arms through my throat—the glue between a million little polaroids. It is notes, songs, snatches of harmonies that wind gnarly vines around soul and set it free from body. If travel has been the demolisher of my walls, music was what kept me in one piece during the glorious fall-out. It is the haze that my breath blew on the windows of a boxcar as the train whirred onward to somewhere new; dissonant chords rolling off Thom Yorke's tongue, sent to light the fire in my belly—baby’s got the bends—and so did I… pressurized, and about to burst.

It is the hours spent on a piece of carpet, with a long-adored brother, eyes closed, listening while eternity drips slow to the layers in an album—Innocence Mission—and my heart on fire—O happy, O happy, the end, the end, the end—she says. Because music is like water, whirling around in ringlets of change, lilting through and welding together chapters of life to form a whole. Because it is only music, and light, and water and God that transcend the gaps and gutters that the rest of life digs deep.

It is the wild-hearted drum-circle, spontaneously combusting after the Easter service at my church, and docks that shook with the voices of youth camp kids, cluttered together to join and surpass the worshiping toads. It is the funereal dance around the blazing fire, one white-hot whisper, so much life found in that Ghanaian celebration at another man’s death.

And maybe then we are like notes. Each bobbing along, suspended at times, meeting others to form chords—some combinations disastrous, clashing gongs, but unrelentingly powerful—and others the sweet tilt of harmony, trills in form of relationship. Our own music that breaks wide the marching lines of time and leaves something wispy on a page to mark the crescendo.

Posted on 6 March 2009 at 1:06 AM Comments (1)

October 6, 2008 - Compost piles, goose flesh, and wanting

Putzing about and listening to William Fitzsimmons…somber, almost painfully candid singer/songwriter, and there is a lingering feeling of something that I can’t put my finger on..

And that seems to happen a lot lately… I find that I undulate between 1) grappling with not being conscious enough of what I feel and 2) feeling everything, but differently than I used to. I find that lately little things wreck me,.. that I can be sitting in a coffee shop catching up on my friend’s blog, and tears just drip out for things I’m reading, I brush past cloth that was given to me in a country I love deeply or I drive and listen to something that simply raises bumps all over the surface of my skin…makes them ripple out of nothing—ex-ni-he-lo—like they were always there… I’m not used to responses being so visceral, so wordless, unnamable…

I’ve been moving, and something about packing one place to turn it into another… undoing, deconstructing one era to build a new one; and maybe that’s a dramatic way of putting it, but somehow this time I don’t think it is. I was pulling apart a lovely apartment, a hobbit-home abode, ridiculous arched walls, where the bedroom was the living room was the foyer, and where the kitchen was the closet was the bathroom :), and everything I’d bought was designed to contain something else. Years of me bloomed there and some of me retracted there, and then there was the knowing that it was time to go. And now as I have been unpacking, I find I’m pulling out remnants and pieces of everything, and I am filled with nostalgia for things that are larger than me and that I may not have experienced yet.

One of my new roommates and I were talking this afternoon, and she mentioned the Creation… how first, for several days of the-seven-day-beginning-of-everything, God separated things: earth from water, darkness from light, one kind of expanse from another—stretching long and ruddy—bursting out blackness that couldn’t know itself yet. And then he filled it. Birds, trees, men, LIFE for the pulled matter-from-matter. But after. After separation, after movement. Then filling with all the things that are supposed to be there, in that place, then.

May it be so.


Posted on 6 October 2008 at 12:05 AM Comments (0)