An Advent inspired reflection on identity

First, welcome to Advent. We started ours by having Allen's folks over for lunch and setting up our tree in the window. There aren't any lights or ornaments on it, but there is a tree in the window :) I should add that despite growing up with this monumental artificial tree (seriously, it was awesome) we're natural tree fans around here :) Can't beat 'em.

Our Sunday wound up with us at Andrew Peterson's "Behold the Lamb" concert, and we enjoyed hearing him and all the wonderful people touring with him. It was an odd sensation though - I attended one of his (possibly the first) concert he did in our area. I'd heard him on the radio and bought his music, and then I sat on the second row of a modest sized church and sang along with every song. I was probably a freshman or sophomore in high school. It was a rough time in my life. All family matters aside being 14 or 15 is just hard. You're starting to deal with freedom and attraction and all that painfully true rubbish about "finding out who you are" and beginning to map out your destiny beyond next month's dance or a summer trip to the mountains. In my case, it was compounded by family issues and by my having absolutely no clue how to dress. Dorky girls with glasses are cute in movies, but for all the heartwarming endings and comeuppances to cheerleaders and the like I don't think any of us actually envy her or want to be her. And yet, while sitting there listening to Andrew Peterson and Eric Peters and I'm not sure who else I was terribly happy. His music, like that of Rich Mullins, has come with me as I grew up and went to college and got married and bought a house where Allen and I try to remember that we're adults with Responsibilities and not just the kids we were ten years ago. It's a small thing and yet significant.

Sometimes my life seems divided into halves. There's the part where we lived in Georgia and the part where we bought a house in Alabama and the part where I met Allen. There's the massive rupture where marrying Allen seemed to break something sharp and fragile and yet beautiful and permanently divide who I am from who I was.  I tease people that estrangement makes the holidays so much easier, but they also make them more fragmented. Without those shared rituals that define us it's hard to maintain a consistent identity. It's particularly hard when you wish to scrap the essence of a flawed identity and still hold onto a recipe, a vacation spot, or a turn of phrase. We sort the shards of who we are from the broken mirror of our past and struggle to put them back together.

Sitting in that much larger church with Allen beside me, some of those shards came together. Reflected back in the music I was hearing, I could see a girl with loves and longings who had grown up into a woman carrying with her those same impulses and desires. That girl who used to stare dreaming up at the night sky while our rv rumbled across another state is the same woman who stopped the car one cold spring to count waterfalls by moonlight. With all the changes of the past ten years my love of beauty and poetry in song has remained constant. Rich Mullins and Andrew Peterson taught me that the Gospel is wherever you see it. A penny, a fallen tree, a falcon circling - in all of these things God's glory is revealed, and I'm driven along by it's beauty. Where this drive will take me I honestly haven't a clue. I'm not a poet to teach these revelations to others or a mother to impress them on my children. I'm simply Natalie. And, since God hasn't made me any of those other things, I suppose it's enough for now.

This is why I haven't been posting this past week - well that and I was sick for a couple days. My cousin is having twins, and I ended up scrambling to finish these blankets before her shower this last Saturday. I ended up using this pattern from Stitch Nation and just tweaking the color repeats slightly when I went from one blanket to the next. As beautifully as the rows knit up it's one of the easiest patterns I've used. There are just four stitches in the whole blanket: knit, purl, yarn-over, and knit-three-together. Easy peasy and super cute. It was really the colors that caught my eye though. Pastels can be adorable for babies, but the vibrant stripes are so fun and eye catching. They also work well when you don't know if you're knitting for a girl or a boy. In my case I found out most of the way through the first blanket. Considering that I punctuated my knitting with rounds of bookcase building, curtain hanging, and lots of cooking for guests it's probably a good thing I didn't put my knitting off any later! Domestic scatterbrain. That's me.

This next week I'll hopefully get back to blogging more. I need to tackle our crazy town assemblage of partially opened boxes in the spare bedroom, and I'm hoping to finally sew up my kitchen curtains. Still, all deadlines are off for a few days. More blogging, more piano playing. Less staying up until 4am trying to weave the last of the ends into a baby blanket.

Most beautiful place on earth

I found this video and really had to share it. It's from a group of artists who hiked the John Muir trail for a month (how I wish I had that time) and spent their time recording all the sights and sounds of the trail along their way. I've hiked far too few miles in these mountains, and watching the trailer I can almost smell the trail.

So here's a glimpse of everything that makes my heart sing when I wake up in the mountains.

The Muir Project - Range of Light from The Muir Project on Vimeo.

P.S. If you liked the video consider donating a dollar (or ten) via their kickstarter page to help them finish this project. I certainly plan to help :)