Home away from home away from home

Sunset Beach is like a second (or third, or fourth...) home to me.  My family began going to Sunset before I was born and I grew up spending summers and spring breaks on that glorious little island.  The thing about it is that there isn't much to show or tell about.  It's about a mile long, complete with houses, pier, about five little shops, and beach.  That's it.  It's not especially romantic but, to me, it's childhood.  It's a place where we never locked our doors, our parents never worried where we were, and everything was just a bike ride or walk away ("everything" meaning ice cream, the beach, junk shops, and canals to play in).  It was my heaven.  While I know that there were countless times of complaining, feeling bored, hated the heat, and cried of sunburn, my memories of Sunset Beach are mostly heavenly.  What I remember most is feeling free.

While I was in North Carolina for the last two weeks, I lucked out and got to go down to the beach with just my mom and my sister to stay with my grand-dad.  There isn't much to tell about the trip because it was fairly uneventful, but that's exactly what I wanted.  I wished I had gotten a few more photos, but, hey, I didn't feel like it at the time.

The box of Kleenex and I were attached at the hip. 

 Mom - if you say one word about not liking this picture then

I'll blow it up and put it on Facebook.

Coast to coast

After a two-week stay in the state of North Carolina, I have finally returned to the beautiful city of Seattle.  A wedding, family visits, friend visits, pet visits, a beach trip, a week-long migraine followed by a week-long head cold, I am here.  I am tired and relaxed, nostalgic and anticipatory.  So much left at home, and so much to look forward to here.  I have missed my T, my cat, my home, my community, my city, and my rhythms.  I'm excited to have the rest of the this week to rest and soak in my friends.  


Next week, my internship begins.  I am starting on Wednesday with four clients on the docket and a consultation meeting with the entire therapy staff.  Maybe you can imagine some of the things that I am feeling.   It's not just been the two years that I have lived in Seattle and started school, though that has certainly intensified the process, but it is has been my life's work.  After all this time, all this preparation, all of the lectures and the reading, all of the happy and sad tears shed, after all of the mental, emotional, and spiritual work that has brought me to this moment - it has arrived. This work becomes tangible.  Next week, my fingers go into the dirt.  

Anticipation + Dread.

Passion + Work.

Fear + Excitement.

Confidence + Worthlessness.

Adulthood + Childhood.

Humanity + Legality.

Doubt + Hope.

Back

Haitus.  I didn't mean to take a haitus.  I love my blog.  I love reflecting into the anonymity of cyber-space.  It's just been nuts.  The strangest thing has been that my trusty laptop, which I never leave home without, was left in Seattle - on purpose.  I got this new phone and it allows me to do most, if not more, of the same things on a miniture little screen that I would normally do with the 5-pound silver brick.  While I love the convenience of my new little gadget, it doesn't allow me to have the same relationship with my blog that I do with a full-sized keyboard and screen.  As you can imagine, a screen of only a few inches really does a number on my eyes. 

It's been an interesting trip so far.  A lot has happened: just a wedding, being a matron of honor, my husband has come and gone, I've spent multiple nights with each family, seen friends, and read so many gloriously mind-numbing magazines.  I realized last night, however, when I could barely hold a conversation at dinner with my family, that I have had little to no alone time.  That is a serious problem for me.  I need time not only when I don't have to talk to anyone else, but also when I literally do not see anyone else.  I feel too much pressure, no matter how many times I may be reassurred, that I am responsible for entertaining and being polite.  Especially when I am at home and haven't seen any of my friends or family for months, I feel rude not to be engaging someone at all hours of the day.  Can't I just tough it out?  I'm only here for a couple of weeks and then I won't see them for several more months.  Can't I just keep going for a couple of days?  Can't I just have one more social engagement?  Fit one more person in?  One more conversation or shared meal?If no one is around, however, then the pressure is off.  Finally. 

So I finally have a moment to breathe.  No one else in this big house for possible only a few more minutes.  But it's glorious.  Somewhere along the line, I will have to figure out how to convince myself that my alone time is not selfish.  And it doesn't mean that I don't love my friends and family.  All it means is that I am an introvert and that I have limits.  Shocking!  I have limits.  My limits are different than anyone else's because I am me and that's ok. 

For now, I've been thinking of and mentally compiling a list of things that I love about the South and/or things that I love about coming home to good ol' North Carolina.  Mainly, I've been doing some serious consideration of how to recruit some of my favorite folks from Seattle to move with T and I back to North Carolina.  We need a tribe.  It's something T and I talk about a lot.  And we talked a lot while he was here about what the next few years will look like for us and especially not wanting to feel alone.  So much has happened for us in Seattle - so much goodness and growth - and we want people, need people, in our lives who have been a part of that experience.

So, here are some things that we're hoping will convince our friends that North Carolina is the place to be:

• Peaches so tender that they fall apart when you eat them; so juicy that they must be eaten over the kitchen sink
• Beaches that are sandy and hot; you can actually get a tan and can actually get in the water
• Bojangles (chicken, buiscuits, seasoned fries, sweet tea), Cook Out (burgers, sweet tea, milkshakes), and Chik-fil-a (chicken sandwhiches and sweet tea)
• Sweet tea
• Swimming pools - similar reasons as the beach; T and I went to our friends' pool in Seattle and thankfully I didn't get in the water, but T did and then he got a cold
• Strangers wave at you/speak to you/acknowledge your humanity on the street
• The evening news is funnier/less depressing to watch when everyone has a Southern accent

Let me know what else you would add!  I've got a good start, but that list could really be beefed up.

I don't get tired of you.  Don't grow weary
of being compassionate toward me!


All this thirst equipment 
must surely be tired of me, 
the waterjar, the water carrier.


I have a thirsty fish in me
that can never find enough 
of what it's thirsty for!


Show me the way to the ocean!
Break these half-measures,
these small containers.


All this fantasy
and grief.


Let my house be drowned in the wave
that rose last night out of the courtyard
hidden in the center of my chest.

Rumi

Inspired

Stumbled across a website this evening that has stolen my heart: Kinfolk.  An online journal completely devoted to the art of shared meals.

This video is a "trailer" for Contigo Austin - a restaurant that opened in Texas just this spring whose goal is to recreate the atmosphere of the Contigo Ranch.  The video and the Kinfolk magazine inspire me to delve into my passion for food gatherings - if only I could find the time to cook :)

P.S. - Music by Balmorhea, another significant love of my life.

Heaviness

Death and dying.  These words have surrounded me literally and figuratively.  A good friend is getting married this weekend here in Seattle, yet her fiancee's brother suddenly died from cancer last week - how to celebrate a marriage when their family is certainly grieving a life?  I'm faced with a family member's imminent death - unobligingly recalling childhood memories that are certainly soon to be all I have left.  It's only a matter of time.  

And a dying to self.  What to make of the parts of me that must die in order for my surroundings to remain status quo?  The parts of me that are bursting to be let out, but that will upset the homeostasis?  Figurative death.  Its residue is thick and sticky, hot and suffocating.

And what makes death so taboo?  Why might it be upsetting for you to read this?  To consider my thoughts about death?  To consider your own thoughts about death?  Your own figurative deaths and the literal deaths that surround you daily?  Why am I so afraid of them?

Red in tooth and claw, we come at last to a fierce and painful city, to the bloody, unobliging reciprocity in which life lives by death, but still insists that death is robbery. (Robert Farrar Capon, p. 48).

Life must have death to be life.  I believe that the richness of life comes out of death - literally and figuratively.  When we figuratively die - when we go to the valleys and are able to climb out - that is when life is lived.  In spiritual terms, resurrection can't take place unless there is first a death.  Yet, death still feels like robbery.  Death still feels cruel.  How long do we wait for resurrection?

Love, etc.

A new documentary:

Summer...again.

Readers, I understand that it's possible that you may get sick and tired of hearing about how much I love summer.  Especially summer in Seattle.  But frankly, I don't care.  This place is freakin' gorgeous.  


My fourth of July weekend was filled with free Neapolitan pizza, beer and magazines on the beach, kickball, cookouts on the beach, tennis, cookouts in a backyard, hard apple cider, fireworks in a park on a lake, and literally almost causing T and I to have a car accident because of how I screamed when I saw Mt. Rainier out on a clear summer day.


Summer in Seattle is like nothing else.


Today, I asked my boss if it were ok for me not to come into work.  She said it was fine.  What I didn't tell her was that since the forecast predicts a high of 80 degrees without a cloud in the sky, I am planning on going kayaking with my friend on a lake.  We're going to paddle on over to a little island for a picnic lunch.  There is no way that I could sit inside, at a stupid desk, in a tiny cubicle, in front of an awful computer screen, knowing the possibility that this day holds outside of that building.  So, here's to many more days of summer.  


The thirst of my mind, spirit, body, and soul is truly being quenched.


Drink, drink, drink it in.

Sip & savor.

Chug & cherish.

Book 2

I started my second (probably first, official) book of the summer: Robert Farrar Capon's Supper of the Lamb.  I stumbled across this gem when I was writing my theology paper about the ethics of food and have been wanting to read the whole thing ever since.  I've written a bit about him before, but this guy is an Episcopalian priest and amateur chef; and should also do stand-up comedy in my opinion.  He is witty, smart, clever, and brilliantly insightful about life and connecting food to theology.  One of the reviews of the book says, "One of the funniest, wisest, and most unorthodox cookbooks ever written."  I completely agree so far.  Here is an excerpt:

There is a habit that plagues many so-called spiritual minds: they imagine that matter and spirit are somehow at odds with each other and that the right course for human life is to escape from the world of matter into some finer and purer (and undoubtedly duller) realm.  To me, that is a crashing mistake - and it is, above all, a theological mistake.  Because, in fact, it was God who invented dirt, onions and turnip greens; God who invented human beings, with their strange compulsion to cook their food; God who, at the end of each day of creation, pronounced a resounding "Good!" over his own concoctions.  And it is God's unrelenting love of all the stuff of this world that keeps it in being at every moment.  So, if we are fascinated, even intoxicated, by matter, it is no surprise: we are made in the image of the Ultimate Materialist. (xxvi)

Capon

Every word penetrates the core of my being.   [Doing my best not to stand on the tremendous soap-box I have built without you noticing.]  You may have heard this from me before, but I'll go there again: so many of our churches today and the great teachers of today inculcate us with the message that the world is bad.  "Be in the world, not of it," from Romans has been misused, in my opinion, to teach us that loving anything on this earth too much is sinful.  All of the goodness that we experience on this earth is nothing compared to what we will encounter that one glorious day that we raise up in to the heavens and really experience life.  So, if that's the case, it's not that we just don't care about the things on this earth, we actually reject them - label them as sinful - so that we can sit on our rear ends and wait for the earth to explode.  Or, we traverse the earth, bashing people over the head that don't think like we do because it's all part of the good, Christian mission.  


God made stuff.  God made people.  God made difference.  And he saw that it was all good.


I don't know what this means for me and my life right now, or what point I'm exactly trying to make.  I especially don't know where all of this feeling came from at 8:30 in the morning. I haven't even had coffee yet!

Pre-nostalgia?

Can nostalgia exist before the nostalgic event happens?  Is there a word for that? Last weekend I went to the Mars Hill graduation with my lovelies, Michaela and Dana, and felt nostalgic of our time in Seattle together.  It kind of put me in a funky funk afterwards - imagining our time at Mars Hill coming to an end, this incredible journey that we started together, the people we've become together and separately, the loves and losses we've all experienced, the future therapists that we never thought we'd become.  These two women are incredible.


And we're all real lookers.  

Hot or Cold

Homemade applesauce has changed my life.  Winter, summer, spring, or fall.

One more

I finished my book!  I really didn't have that much more to go.  But, in the last pages, a moving passage:

This is the most profound spiritual truth I know: that even when we're most sure that love can't conquer all, it seems to anyway.  It goes down into the rat hole with us, in the guise of our friends, and there is swells and comforts.  It gives us second wind, third winds, hundredth winds....When someone enters that valley with you, that mud, it somehow saves you again.  At the marsh, all that mud and one old friend worked like a tenderizing mallet.  Where before there had been tough fibers, hardness, and held breath, now there were mud, dirt, water, air, mess - and I felt soft and clean.

[Sadly I started this post on Wednesday when I finished the book and and written a whole lot about this quote, but then it got erased by the internet gremlins.  Sad.]