books and plans and HOPE

“Are we…dead?” I asked Laura as we smoothly rose upwards.

“Because this is ‘heaven’?” she responded.

“I sure hope heaven is a lime green escalator in a giant room of books with sunshine as we rise into clouds,” I mused.

You’ll never guess it—we were in the Seattle Public Library downtown for the first time. After promptly picking up our “Discovery” library cards, we took to the escalators to explore the block-wide building of windows, books, and steel.

 Like teenagers getting their drivers’ licenses for the first time, we giggled and held our new library cards in awe.

We spent the afternoon sitting on the top floor, gazing out of skylights and writing at the tall desks on square stools. Laura dropped her pen, and we both looked down at it. “It’s so far!”

Two letters and two postcards later, we started towards home again, managing not to check out any items with our library cards.

I’ve been thinking a lot about timing—how right it feels to be in Seattle. Even something as simple as going to the library can feel like just what I’m supposed to be doing. Yet I have no plans. Sure, we have events going on this summer to attend. We have the usual cadence of community and DG and all. But I have no plans.

I used to have plans. I used to have it all figured out. At any point in time, I could pull up a Word doc that listed out my five-year plan. In college, it was always, these are the classes I am going to take or these are the clubs I am going to run. I’ve finally reached a point where I have no idea what the next five years will bring.

I used to want things: to get an MFA, to have a boyfriend, to have a designated place that felt like “home,” to travel internationally often…the list goes on. Of course I still want it all. I will never stop aspiring to be all that I can and do all that I can and absorb all that I can.

But I am learning that life comes in seasons. The weather is not in our hands.

By some mystery, I have been pulled to this small (feels so now, anyways) city on the West coast, and I couldn’t imagine myself anywhere else. Not even my childhood dream, not even Arizona.

When I think about how much I love this city, I start to question: could I ever actually leave here? I can’t say I’ve ever actually wanted to stay in a particular place. I’ve always been gogogo; where to next? (I’m not sure this is entirely accurate, considering I’ve always lived in PA until now, but it feels so in some way.) When I moved here, it was with the intent that I would stay a year and then move on to somewhere else. Since my whole one-year plan was tossed out the window within two or three weeks of moving here, every new step has been a blessed surprise.

So maybe I won’t be going to grad school in Pittsburgh or Missoula or Tucson anytime soon. Maybe I won’t even be leaving Washington in the foreseeable future. Maybe I won’t get to go to Europe or Asia in the coming years. Maybe Pickle & I won’t ever get to spend a year in France.

I’m learning to accept that timing is perfect, and we must go where we are called, even if we don’t know why we are going there or what epiphany may follow a loud boom in the middle of the night on a weekend alone in a big red, creaky house.

So I have no plans because I do not know where I will be called next. And I might not know for sometime. And I might not know until just then, just before I am to go.

Until then, I will live actively and with intention. Until then, I can only have HOPE.

lessons from an elevator

Today, I got in the elevator on the 33^rd floor of the Westin building. It paused for a moment, doors open. Then, suddenly, the doors started shaking in a pulse, as if they were trying to close but someone on the inside of the elevator shaft was fighting to keep them open. The whole car shook a bit, and I quickly hopped back to the lobby.

“I don’t think I trust that elevator,” I said to a passing friend.

“Oh, it always does that,” he said, “it’s fine.”

“Still, I think I’ll wait for another,” I stood until a moment later, a working elevator arrived quickly sunk me back to sea level.

I’ve realized, as one growing in the hope of Christianity, that this is what we so often do with Christ. We take something routine, like the day-to-day, and pretend to put our trust in it (the elevator will of course take us safely to the ground), but when that routine starts to get bumpy, we don’t trust more, but we run away. Even though the elevator has proved to be true, through bumps and shakes, we get out and search for something that seems more stable because we chose it—we have that control.

I find myself trying to control everything. I want to be the determiner of my own future. I want to fix everything. I want to redeem past follies and save my dear cousin. But I can’t do ANY of that. It’s not up to me.

I think it’s time I stop running away from the shaky ground and recognize that there is a Rock that holds strong regardless of how uncertain circumstance my seem.

Unfortunately, I can’t accept it as simply as it sounds, so for the time being, I still rely on the elevator of choice, the smooth ride. 

citiesofyouth

Lying on my bed, I watch the leaves of the weeping fig shake in the brief passing of the oscillating fan. This is the city.

We got the tree because we wanted to “green” up our apartment. Essentially, we just wanted a hanging plant to go in the little half-wall nook between our two areas. When I saw the tree, though, I knew it was coming home with us. I need more trees in my life.

Tonight, we went to South Lake Union Park for a picnic with our church family. There were maybe fifty or sixty people, and we talked, played Frisbee, walked along the water, munched on snacks. Sometimes, it’s hard to believe that so much grassy green could exist amidst a bustling metro of nearly 600,000 people.

I also have a hard time believing that we could walk there, a simple mile and a half, and so soon, be back in the homey yet modern Uptown with its big apartment complexes and city views. And, of course, my weeping fig.

I went for a run yesterday. The first official run of my “training.” I’m afraid to say it here in case I wimp out, but I will anyways. I am training to run a half-marathon on September 7^th.  It’s a jumbo birthday present to myself: meeting a goal that I set for this year. However, yesterday was only day one, a plain jog of three miles. But there is a first day to everything. Hopefully, fourteen weeks from now, I will be running 13.1 miles around Lake Chelan. I have until July to register, so until I officially sign up, it’s all just talk.

Anyways, I went for a run. I crossed the bridge to the usual park and took the trail nearly to Magnolia and back: a nice little 5K in about 30 minutes. Not too shabby for a first run after a long hiatus.

Dusk was creeping over the Sound, leaving trails of pink in the blue sky, but Mount Rainier stood strong and white in the East. The running path glides right beside Puget Sound for several miles. On my run back, I got to stare at the view—the mesh of mountain and metro. Seattle’s streak of steel presents a foreground that, while beautiful in its own way, cannot match the daunting awe of the mountain.

City. Creation. Contrast.

Sometimes I wonder what on earth I am doing in Seattle, how I got to be here. But I really can’t imagine myself anywhere else right now. Though I am young, I find that this is exactly where I belong.

And gosh am I young. Sometimes I forget it. A silly little number attached to our bodies is a terrible representation of who we are in life, but it’s a funny thing anyways. I try to make it a point to find out how old people are, mostly just because it always amazes me. Everyone here looks like they are eternally 22.

When will I learn what is ‘young’? I pile on endless goals that don’t get reached and obstacles to push myself harder because, well gosh, I haven’t even submitted ANY poems ANYWHERE since graduating college a year ago (really? a whole year?), and I’ve only done one painting since moving to Seattle, and I haven’t learned a new song in weeks, and I have so many books that I’m just in-the-middle-of, and I have so much to do before I die!

I’m still not entirely sure for whom I do it all, or aspire to do it all, anyway.

Regardless, I find myself trying too hard and achieving too little. I’ve at least learned to be very lax in my goals. I don’t feel overwhelmed if I don’t get that sketch done or write that poem. I have notes for it all, and it will happen eventually.

The strange conundrum of being young is wanting to achieve it all now, yet knowing I have the rest of my life, yet not knowing how long the rest of my life is. It’s a strange balancing act that relies on endless tomorrows.

For now, I will lean on the words, “Be happy, young man, while you are young, and let your heart give you joy in the days o your youth.” Ecclesiastes 11:9

twenty-four

If you’ve been keeping up, you know my obsession with water: my desire to be in any body of water that lies before me. Baker Lake was no exception.

The chilly day broke with the treeline into the expanse of calm water, barely rippling on the surface. The shoreline was warm, shallowed by small stones. I couldn’t resist.

Three of us went in. We walked slowly, expecting a steep drop into treading water, but it didn’t happen. Fifty feet across the lake, we were still only in to our waists. I sunk under, waving my torso like a mermaid and gasping for air at the surface: the shock of cold was sobering and tight in the lungs.

I started full-out swimming. Stroke, stroke, stand. I was testing the depth, but even so far out that my friends were unrecognizable on shore, I could still stand with my head fully above-water. I later learned it was a man-made lake, which may have been some explanation, but all of this is beside the point.

The point is that it was beautiful. The Northern Cascades echoed the cloudy sky with clumps of snow, as if a wrinkled sheet had been tossed over the varying degrees of blue water, blue mountain silhouettes, and never-ending blue atmosphere.

Floating on my back, I closed my eyes. Silence. Ultimate silence, not even waves lapping or birds crying. The mountains seemed to bellow a deep but silent hum like a wavering subwoofer, waiting for a boom. I opened my eyes and looked around. This is what it means to be in it.

“AYIYIYIYI!!!” I shouted in a screech. It echoed between the trees, and the hills sang it right back to me.

Solitude.

Such silence and peace – no worry – left my mind to wander. I mostly thought of how I got to this place, how I never knew it existed before, and how I would soon have to leave and go back to the chaos of city and work and stress.

Where was I a year ago today? Two years ago? I remember them both clearly. I was celebrating. Celebrating the life of my best friend. Last year and this year, the celebration is bittersweet: I grieve as well. He would be twenty-four today.

22nd Birthday, 2011 Joe's Crab Shack

I spent a good part of the evening, only past dark, imagining that he was with me, imagining that his whole death was just some made up sob story in my terrible mind. Would I be here if he was alive? The answer is a simple no.

My migration to Seattle was part of an unplanned series of events that mystically brought me to a new purpose in life that I can’t quite define yet, but it wasn’t a mistake or unintentional. Is that what divine intervention is?

I have to remind myself that grief cannot last. Eventually, I will have to accept that I cannot bring him back; I cannot go back in time to him, and nothing I do or wish or say will change the circumstance. Death is permanent. What comes after?

Sometimes I wish I knew. I wish I could just be comforted in knowing that there is nothing to be sad for, that grieving was only my selfish emotion of wanting what I cannot have, missing what filled my life most then. But I do not know, and grief feels so much larger than my sorry self.

Do you think I could find him here?

Hiding in the mountain coves

like a plane wreck unmapped

like someone who doesn’t want

to be found?

I think I hear God

in the still waters

in the

skyscraper wind

that chases the birds from the ledge.

I think he knows I’m here.

I think he knows I hear him.

I think he doesn’t mind.

Can he hear me too?

Can he hear the boiling

behind  quivering eyes

where there is nothing

but him

and me?

I get lost in wondering

where you might be now.

Do I carry you with me

everywhere I go?

Are you living vicariously through me

even though

you are dead?

Or am I living through you,

your presence the wine

in which I dip my bread?