Itchy feet, waiting feet

Since moving to California Allen and I spent two and a half years wandering around California and the Pacific Northwest. We took Thanksgiving trips to the coastal redwoods and weekend jaunts to the Sierra Nevada range. My last birthday was spent exploring the northern California coast. For those years I lived in a sort of chaco clad fairy tale. It was a fairy tale of trying to fit in and paying insane amounts in rent and flying home for Christmas (and funerals - too many funerals), but at the end of the day we were only four hours from some of the finest scenery our nation contains. And once a month on average we went off and snapped pictures and climbed trails and feasted our souls on God's creative generosity. Now it's my turn to sit and watch my Facebook feed as other people dash off on trips to Yellowstone, Canada, and D.C. Once again I'm trying to be content in my circumstances.

And that's the rub. We bought a new house, remodeled, bought a slew of furnishings... It's been a good year. By any account we are blessed beyond our merits. And yet I'm sitting here confessing that I still struggle with being content. Because when you've got an apartment in California your itchy feet can carry you away most anytime. Now I've got a house in Alabama, and when you've just sunk a bundle, it's 95 in the shade, and the mosquitoes are biting you end up staying at home organizing your C.S. Lewis collection. But my traveling feet are itchy and longing for an evening spent around a campfire sipping hot toddy and watching the moon rise.

I don't think there's any conclusion I can draw here. God calls us to contentment. I struggle with it. Sometimes I struggle because I'm not settled and don't have a home, and sometimes I struggle because I'm feeling too settled. As Shakespeare said "Man is a giddy creature," and I'm as giddy as any. This is my confession.

And we're here

Last Sunday Allen and I celebrated our 6th wedding anniversary and simultaneously moved back into our house (actually we just drove in from our trip to Tennessee - I'd finished the moving in the week before while Allen was out of town). It's so very good to be home. Admittedly home still involves large numbers of boxes and not knowing where my cup measures are, but it's still home. The funny part is that it didn't feel like hope until Allen and I shoved a bookcase in the den nook. I don't even have any books on my bookcase - it just feels better having it there with my papasan chair pulled up beside it ready for my next jaunt through Shakespeare. It's a familiar little corner in what's still a rather unfamiliar home. I think it was in Grace Livingston Hill's Cloudy Jewel where she described the whirlwind process of buying a house and all the furnishings for it and finally settling "to get acquainted with their tables and chairs." That pretty well sums it up. It's odd to look around and realize that at least two thirds of our furniture we didn't own before we bought our house. We've gone from a little two bedroom beige apartment to a five bedroom house full of colors, our single couch has grown to two and a loveseat, and our dining room can sit eight comfortably. It's quite a change.

Speaking of which, I'm eternally grateful for second hard furniture. Fortunately I like fairly simple styles, because we couldn't afford half of this at full retail price. In fact, almost everything we bought was on sale or price matched. Aside from appliances and building materials, our new couches are the only truly new items we bought, and they were a last minute find at a store going out of business that very day. Everything else came from Craigslist, Ebay, and second hand stores. It takes time though. I looked around for maybe five months before we ordered our dining room chandelier. That meant sifting through literally tens of thousands of light fixture on craiglist, ebay, home depot, and etsy in addition to perusing online retailers and various home decor stores like West Elm and Ethan Allen. But when I clicked the "buy it now" button last night I was pretty confident that we were getting a good product at a good price. We saved at least $100 off retail and at least $300 by finding a chandelier we liked better than the pricier Ethan Allen one we'd both liked previously. Not a bad reward when you realize that the difference I saved would have paid for the easy chairs in my den. Even though I have moments where I wish I could just place an order and get it all done, I'm pretty proud at what I've been able to pull together. I don't know that any of my deals have been worth of the bargain hunter's Olympics, but they've been good enough for us.

Although sometimes I wonder why I've moved on to furniture when my kitchen still needs it's final touch up painting. And my dry goods need putting away. Also, where are my measuring cups? And while I ponder these questions a few more pressing ones come to mind - like what native flowering tree am I going to plant beside my front driveway and is it available at my local nursery? Yep, homemaker's ADHD setting in here. Too many projects and not enough time/energy/brain cells to go around. We're working on that too though :) For now we're just glad to be in our own home with our own fridge and our own pantry of spices and our own chairs. And I'm super glad we've got a gas range. It means I get to officially play with fire as part of my housewifely duties. That's awesome!

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 :)

Going Home

We'll soon be leaving California for our beautiful home state of Alabama. There are already boxes stacking up in the spare bedroom, and I've started bookmarking real estate listings. After living in three different states it's finally time to be home - to settle and plant tomatoes and bake bread in my own kitchen and drink sweet tea with friends from church and watch the fireflies flickering on a muggy evening. I won't have my own Christmas tree this year, but next year I'll buy the biggest tree I can fit in my house and put lights in the trees.

Lord please be willing.

I'm going to plant bulbs outside my windows and watch them come up in the spring. I'm going to have a place to spread out my projects and have six things going at once. We're going to put a pinball machine and a ping pong table in the basement and invite Allen's brothers over. I can't wait. I'm already going over paint colors in my head. I'm trying to prepare myself for a house that isn't perfect. I don't want all the pressure of "falling in love." Really though, I want to walk into a house and see the next ten years staring back at me in the windows. I want a place that says "Sure Yosemite was your refuge in California - this can be your refuge every day." Hard lines asking a house to live up to one of the most amazing national parks in the country, but there it is. I want to sunlight on the floor to be my Merced River and porch to be my Tuolumne Meadows. I bet that's one the real estate agent hasn't heard before!

Night and Honeysuckle

While my class is taking their final I thought I’d go ahead and bang out an essay of my own. I had originally meant this topic as class discussion, but various scheduling collisions prevented our getting around to it. It’s a pity too because I thought Chesterton’s “End of the World” would be an interesting counterpoint to the usual character and leadership type discussions. Briefly, Chesterton’s essay is about his travels to a little French village in the mountains called Le Bout Du Monde and his discovery that the world does not all end in the same place. If that doesn’t make sense then consider where you are most your own - where all your art and understanding and being come together in one expression. That is the world’s end. For Chesterton’s Frenchman the world ends at sunset in one still quiet village set amid the cacophonous medley of plunging chasms and endless peaks. Chesterton said, “If the story of the world ended here it ended well. Then I wondered if I myself should really be content to end here, where most certainly there were the best things of Christendom -- a church and children’s games and decent soil and a tavern for men to talk with men.” To Chesterton’s own surprise he realizes that his world doesn’t end here. He wants an English cabman in an English city and an English policeman to wave them through. I can’t do justice to Chesterton’s imaginative love for his chosen home, but to hear him talk even the grime of London is only the patina on an old platter or the vines masking a stately country home. It’s the end of the world for him. It’s where all his livelihood and desires converge.

If you can’t see where this would make a good class discussion for a class on “Character and Servant Leadership” then let me explain. Chesterton had it impressed upon him suddenly and deeply how good it was to be in certain place and was then equally impressed with the necessity of the far better good of being himself in another place. The good that was indeed good was not the good for which he wept on his journey back down the mountain. This is a rare quality I think. He saw something that was good and that really should be preserved by the people who love it, but he was also able to see that there’s something out there uniquely his to preserve and love. I wanted to challenge the class to think about what they love and want to see carried out in the world to think about how they wanted to do it -- all the while acknowledging and understanding how other people are likewise fighting for their corner of Christendom. I think that’s one of the rare qualities displayed in Chesterton’s essay. He’s not trying to convince his French friend that England is better. He in fact admits quite the opposite - it’s precisely because the Frenchman’s world is better for the French that the English world is better for him. They’re complementary visions not competing. We need people who love cities and deserts and plains and mountains and oceans and caves and interstellar travel because if I were to have charge of a desert I’d make a huge muck of it. It’s a glorious adventure for a week or three days, but it’s not my world. I wanted my students to see that they have the chance to grab onto a chunk of the world and make it theirs - to love it through glory and grime and, maybe just once, to weep when they cannot be near it.

So where does the world end for me? I will confess that I love many things and cannot be as rooted as Chesterton and his desire for Wallham Green, and of all the things I have ever seen one of the best is a summer's evening in Alabama. It doesn’t matter much what one is doing then - chasing fireflies, drinking tea, or riding the 4-wheeler out to watch the sunset behind the hayfields. It’s just good to be outside in the warm, damp air smelling cut grass and honeysuckle and listening to the frogs and crickets chanting. The ac fan cuts in and after a while everyone goes inside to eat pizza and watch a Marx Brothers movie. You scratch an itch and are grateful the mosquitoes are outside and not in. No matter how many other sunsets I may see this is where my world ends. It's home and always has been.

Ruminations from Tornado Alley

Some of you may know about the massive storms that ripped through Alabama last week. There were something like 35 tornadoes that day, whole neighborhoods blow apart, and hundreds of people dead. Driving through parts of Tuscaloosa reminded me of footage from Iraq right after the invasion. One moment you're driving through an ordinary downtown area and the next it looks like the street has been shelled. I've honestly never seen anything like it.

A friend of mine said that she was going down to help out, so I volunteered to go with her. A friend of hers was heading up a team from the diocese to sort and transfer donations to some of the harder hit outlying areas. Having seen the pictures I'm all ready to roll up my sleeves and start tossing bricks or handing out water or do something mildly awesome and heroic. Instead I found myself with a clipboard in hand writing down how many diapers and hygiene packs were heading down in a van to poor, rural Eutaw (pronounced Utah). Then I hopped in the car with my friend and a couple more girls to follow the trucks and vans down and sort out all the supplies onto shelves. That was it. I wrote down an inventory sheet and then helped to sort out soup and bottled water and cans of tuna. I didn't see much reward for my labor. I didn't even see much labor for my time. It honestly seemed like a complete waste of all my heroic intentions. Talking with my friend on the way back she mentioned that service was a great way to bring people together because when you serve it's all about giving of yourself - there's no room for "me" when you're serving. I wish I could agree with her. The whole time I was there a part of me was thinking "Look, God I'm doing something awesome. I'm giving up my Saturday to help tornado victims. I've even got a pair of gloves. Surely you have something more important for me to do than count diapers." Wah, wah, wah. Not very noble or self-sacrificing I don't think. But it reminds me of so much of life. We show up thinking that God is surely going to let us do something awesome when really He just wants us to count diapers. We're like a bunch of little kids begging to lift that really heavy log and having to be content with sticks. Sometimes, we aren't that awesome. We go to the right place with the best intentions and then we sit around thinking about much cooler the other aid tent is. It's not about us. But we make it about us. In our own little minds it's always about us.

So I'm glad that I went to Tuscaloosa. It reminded me just how much I don't love people. It reminded me how much I want to pose for the cameras and be a "hero." Yeah, I went down there with good intentions. With a different crew I might have learned a completely different lesson. My compassion might have been touched. I might have learned love and teamwork and service. By God's grace I believe I'm capable of learning and doing all those things. But, today, I learned again that all my righteousness is a shabby cover-up for my own expansive ego. Unfortunately I expect we'll be going back home before I can really get my hands dirty rebuilding this state I love. God bless those cans of soup I counted. Because, despite the unflattering lesson I learned, I really did go down there to give my best.