"It's not time to worry yet"

This past weekend I was blessed with the opportunity to attend the wedding of my childhood best friend. It was beautiful (Seriously, my friend and her new husband are two of the coolest people ever and they are way more artistic than me which sometimes makes me jealous but mostly makes me so happy because I get to enjoy their beautiful art) and I cried more than a few times.
This is the girl I used to sit with when we were just 4 and 5 and 6 and we would dream about the future. We would dream about babies, and being teenagers (which at least in my mind seemed like a big deal to 6 year old me) and play pretend. We decided when we were just little girls that we needed to marry brothers because we just needed to be sisters (which, of course, didn't happen. We've settled for being friends instead, though I still haven't given up hope on being related to that sweet family through marriage some day. We both have single siblings!)
My weekend seemed to be full of marriage related things. My soon to be brother-in-law announced his engagement, and my fiancé and I spent Sunday afternoon on the couch of the couple doing our premarital counselling talking about serious things and less serious things about our special day, and the rest of our lives together.
I remember on Saturday night walking out of my friend's wedding reception feeling this overwhelming sense of love. Because I had just seen such beautiful love between these two people I care about deeply who had just promised to be each other's person for the rest of their lives, and because of this amazing man beside me who will soon be my husband and the way he takes such good care of my heart.
This weekend was full of so many moments that gave me confidence in the decision I have made to engage in this sacred relationship with this human being. I spent most of the weekend in tears, but it was the healing kind, the kind that once they dried left me with life in my bones and the return of this spark, this feeling of rightness for the direction my life is going.
I remember one moment during our premarital counselling on Sunday where we had to walk through the last fight/argument/disagreement we had. It was something I was rather worked up about, for various reasons, and even as we were acting out this argument again, I was struck by his calmness, his steadiness. I wanted this to be a big deal, to be so strongly moved by emotion, for him to share in my dramatic waves of feelings on this particular subject. And during our acting out this argument, someone said the words or something stirred up the words in me that brought an end to all my internal struggle. My mind was still. I got it.
He's confident in us
I was reading a quote by Glennon Doyle Melton today where she talks about To Kill A Mockingbird, and how there is this fire that creeps closer and closer but Atticus remains calm. His calmness tells his children "It's not time to worry yet."
It takes me a while to feel sure of a good thing. I am quite introspective, and if there is something to worry about I probably will. But that day, and this whole weekend, as I watched the man I love and his steadiness and his confidence in things, I was reminded that its not time to worry yet.
Everything is still ok, or it will be. I can do hard things, uncomfortable things, and not be broken by them. Come what may, life is about loving more and not less. Even in the face of fear and doubt, even in the face of circumstances you really wish weren't there.
It reminds me of the Joan of Arc quote I've clung to this whole engagement: "I'm not afraid. I was born to do this."
I am afraid, but that doesn't change that I was born to do this. I was born to love, and be loved. Just because it's hard doesn't mean it isn't beautiful and worthwhile and good.
I feel so profoundly lucky to be in this kind of sacred relationship, bearing witness to each other's lives, reminding one another to lean in instead of out, that its not time to worry yet, that there is so much goodness and beauty in the hard.

redemption story

It's been a while now since the first day he slid this ring on my finger. And I haven't yet been able to write about it because its a story filled with so much hard, holy ground, with the twinkling hope of redemption and also the bravery that comes with being afraid. I don't know why I am sharing this sacred story now, only that this story is telling itself whether I share it or not, so intricately woven into the very fibre of my being, and I am so grateful to be living it. This story is something I feel I am not enough for, that I keep waiting to be snatched from me. It has opened up my heart in new ways, and brought with is so much healing and redemption. The season I find myself in is a strange mixture of grief and gratitude, of a heart aching from fullness. It's a story so sacred and beautiful I need to tell it, even if I fumble through it at times, even if at points in the journey it doesn't make sense, even to me. So, here it begins with the story of how I got engaged.

 

 

I haven’t yet shared the story of how I got engaged because it is something that I am still processing, something that still feels so raw and big and monumental that I haven’t yet had the time to ponder in my heart the way I want to. Sometimes I wonder if I will ever be ready. I wonder if people are ever ready for the events that change their lives, or if maybe we all spend every single day waking up and realizing we don’t know how we got here.

 I got engaged on the first of July, under the summer heat, just down off a busy highway by a creek that ran with murky water. I knew it was coming but the moment caught me off guard, perhaps as all big and grand moments do. Despite my desire for something small, lacking in the grand gesture department, I felt the shift the moment when he came to me by the water and took my hand. Maybe in that moment I knew. I knew my life wouldn’t be the same. I knew I was walking towards my future in a way that most women feel when they are walking down the aisle. Perhaps that is why I lingered by the water a moment longer than necessary, whispering to the man soon to be my fiancé, “Come, look at this. Do you see?” Do you see this snail and this slug and this frog, this life that exists within murky waters, that is thriving in this place that looks like a wasteland? Do you see this water, flowing, carrying with it everything I’ve left behind?

 I remember once, during my first year of college, going to the river. I had this burning desire to create a ceremony for myself, to let go of this heavy pain I had been carrying since the death of my cousin, the confusion and the inner turmoil and the desperation that had been etched into my body by his hands before they turned ice cold. I needed a release for myself, a cleansing ceremony so I could finally feel forgiven, so that I could stop looking for affection in strange men and food and self-hatred, to be free of the ghost I was carrying along behind me like it was my birthright. By that river I begged and pleaded to be clean. I had forgotten, or perhaps I didn’t know then, that suffering isn’t the birthright of any human on earth. That to let go, all I needed to do was let go. I wanted to be clean, free, but what I didn’t know was that I already was.

 I remember in my late teenage years bringing with me a jar of sand and ash on a family vacation. That vacation was a purging time for me, when I brought so many toxins into my body it made me sick, and when I exhaled them with just as much ferocity and weeping. The jar of ashes represented this grief that I was carrying around with me, this mournful howling that filled my bones ever since I became so ill I thought I was going to die. I collected this ash and howled and wept over this empty space in my body that had once been full, over what had been taken from me while I was sleeping. And on this particular trip, after having arrived with grand intentions and my jar of ashes, I slipped out to the pond with the water that flowed and was recycled and came out new, and I let my ashes slip between my fingers. In the days that followed I shook and bled and howled, but when I left I felt the work of refinement that had taken place.

 The water, that had represented so much pain and heartache for me, where I had released and burned and purged and wept and vomited and begged for forgiveness, the same water that flowed at the river and at the pond because everything is recycled and flows and moves, flowed before me in the moments before he took my hand. And I sat there, with my feet dangling into the coolness, on the edge of a log, and I had a feeling that this meant something. I didn’t know what, only that this moment and this water and this log and that slug inching its way across a rock and him and me and the flow all meant something. I could feel the newness on the wind, and I wanted to savor the now. I almost had a moment where I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to get off the log. I didn’t want to leave behind the water, the slug inching its way across a rock, this breath. I didn’t want the startling entry into something new, to be birthed into a world which I didn’t yet have language for, to enter the flow.

 But I did. And I remember that last breath, the sharp inhale before I rose off the log and took his hand, following him up away from the water. I was stepping into something new.

 I followed him up the steep incline of shifting rocks and pebbles, the ground shaking and giving way under my feet. And then I saw it, the words he’d written on the side of a bridge, the words asking me to be his wife. And I felt the rebirth. In that split second between my recognizing the words and what they meant and my yes, I felt the starting over. And I knew I was ready. And I knew I was afraid. And I knew with every fiber of my being that I was born for this. And I knew that the water that had always flowed and carried my pain and hurt and agony was still moving, and I must too. It was time to step away from the old and enter into the new. It was time to enter into the flow that was all around me and in me and through me.

 My hands tremble with anticipation and fear and promise and wonder as I stare down at this ring on my finger, the one I never wanted but am becoming so grateful for. It reminds me that redemption runs deep, that the old passes away and the new comes, that I must be willing to step into the flow, that love wins. Love wins and love wins and love wins and I am and I am and I am.

 Adjusting to this new season has felt thick and hard, and at times I wonder if stepping into new waters was too much. My legs tremble and leave me aching for the shore, for what I knew. This engagement season has felt so full of redemption and healing, the kind of healing that cuts deep and burns through, the kind that purges the soul and washes clean, like flowing water. It is bitter at first taste, yes, but it is sweet. There is something for me here, and I am as sure of it as I am sure of the wind. I can’t see it, but I know it’s there. I can feel it deep within my bones, in the places that I once thought of as void and empty.

"even my skin held memory"
For the past few years, August has felt like a cool breeze. It's a moment of breath, of reprieve. I live quieter in August, pondering in my heart everything I've stored up in the months past, and this August is no exception.
This August, I'm participating in a project hosted by Morgan Day Cecil called #justbeherewithme. The intention is to be more present in our lives by logging off social media for a day, a week or the whole month of August. I've dedicated my Sunday's to being social media free, and while my fingers crave the familiar scroll of the smart phone, I'm finding much more room to be present.
I'm learning to be present with my story. Continuing the work I started at the end of July, I'm taking a break from the public sector of blogging and documenting my personal story in my journal. Some days its hard to even scratch the words out, despite knowing I'll be the only one to read them. Some days writing them feels like a cathartic release.
"I think you need to speak it. I think you need to be as specific as possible and allow the space to empty on its own"
Writing these words, adventuring through my past, it feels like building monuments. "Thank you," I whisper to each segment as I finish with it, "But I no longer need you anymore." And by doing so I'm slowly undressing the layers of shame and guilt I've worn for so many years.
I'm finding the memories of the past are so deeply a part of me that even my skin holds the memory. My body remembers, even when my mind forgets. Which means this month has also meant hours laboring in pain as I ache to give birth to this story, practicing yoga, having honest conversations with the people I love and letting them help to begin building something anew in me. Every positive touch, is wiping over the old pathways where love = pain and rewriting it with the message love = love. The brave act of letting others hold me in my story is turning out to be one of the most beautiful things I've ever done, and the giving and receiving of this love, this medicine, is an honor. I'm also learning to keep some of this love, this medicine, for myself, as I'm finally in a place of speaking words of love over myself.
In August, I'm participating in a yoga challenge called #thisisagoodbody over on instagram (with the exception of Sundays, of course, which we're all taking off to find a few sacred moments). We're getting honest about things like shame, and this vulnerability is changing me. By combining honesty with movement, my heart is transforming. I'm discovering just how much negativity and shame I held around my body that I didn't even realize was there, and I'm beginning to work through that.
This season, which technically began in late July, is so healing and powerful. I've been hesitant to write about it, not only because it is so achingly personal but because finding the right words to convey the tender places of my heart lately is a seemingly impossible task. I'm finding freedom in places I never expected to find it. I'm stretching my heart wide open, going back into the past so I can move forward into my future. I'm speaking up and saying what for years I kept silent, using the voice that for so long I let others take from me.
I'm being present and honest with this moment, with the people I love, with myself and my story. And I proclaim over all of it goodness.

Butterfly Soup

"If you cut open a chrysalis you won't find a caterpillar growing wings. You won't find a caterpillar butterfly hybrid. You'll find butterfly soup. The caterpillar doesn't just change, it dissolves, it becomes completely broken down that it might become an entirely new creation"

There are times when my heart is full and I find it hard to write. I cry, I stare at the sky, I fit into small spaces and try to fit the large scale meaning of life into my finite human mind. But there are moments so big, so profound, so beautiful that they change you on a cellular level, and this past week felt like that for me.
It felt like butterfly soup, like the caterpillar dissolving and changing on an intricate level, making way for new birth, for butterfly wings.
Maybe I'm not there yet, but I like to think I'm a little bit closer to knowing what it's like to have butterfly wings.

I'm not a dancer. I'd like to be, but somehow my lack of coordination and clumsiness has made that a near impossible feat. I'm not fearless, or especially brave. I'm more like the cowardly lion, always looking for courage. I love deeply and wildly, so I know what it's like to live life as a reflection of one's heart. What I didn't know was what it was like to move as a reflection of one's heart in response to one's self. When the music plays, when the false selves are stripped away, when all that exists is the sound of a heartbeat and a group of people digging deep so you can root down and up, I learned a little something about loving myself. Not about being fearless but letting each breath and movement become a hallelujah fulfilled in and through me, letting it become the answer to every prayer I prayed when I didn't think I would make it, holding myself in a place of honour without judgement or shame. My body isn't that of a dancer, but I think my heart is. I think my heart knew how to dance all along, if only I'd give it the freedom to do so. I think when the skeleton of my old self was dissolved, all that boneless-ness gave my heart space to expand out and pulsate through every fiber and cell of my body. I think in that moment, I finally grew my butterfly wings.

Butterflies have beautiful lives. I heard that once. "You're like a butterfly," He told me, "Butterflies can't see their wings, they have no idea how beautiful they are."

It feels strange, moving with these new wings. It takes time to adjust, to learn how to adapt to life with these wings on your back. The big change, they say, is from caterpillar to butterfly and while I agree I also think that learning how to fly when you've spent your whole life crawling on the ground is a pretty big adjustment in and of itself. Sometimes I flap them around, just because I can. These beautiful gifts, this freedom, sometimes its hard to believe that it's all mine.

I got to experience the most beautiful thing the other day. I got to experience a room full of people believing in my wings. They knew I could fly before I did. They knew the chrysalis would eventually break open when I doubted it. They held me in the becoming, and rejoiced with me in the flying. It is the most incredible feeling knowing there are so many people rooting for your freedom, affirming that you are beautiful and deserving, worthy and smart and kind and lovely. And I am so blessed by their hands, their words, their love. I am so grateful.

There is a song I used to listen to way back in junior high I'd all but forgotten about until my tribe spoke these words of faith and love over me. I related to it then, and I think a part of me always has been getting ready for these wings.
Butterfly girl, don't you know you're beautiful by now? Too long in hiding. Free to shine girl, time to spread your wings and show your colours to the world.

I'm a lot of things in life. I'm a daughter, a sister, a friend, a girlfriend. I used to say I was never good enough, that I didn't deserve good things, that I was broken. I'm learning to replace those words with new words like beautiful, trusting, loving and free. I used to not understand the magic of butterflies. But as one floated across my front yard today, I couldn't help but pause and admire the beauty and strength it took this tiny creature to become. I didn't understand butterflies until I became one. Now? I think they're the most beautiful things in the world.

When the mountains speak love

If my life is measured by summers, it is most definitely measured in these long, hot days running wild in the mountains on our annual summer trip to Miette.
Every time we roll up that windy mountain road, it feels a little bit more like coming home. The days are long, the mountains tall, the coffee strong, the time spent together as a family valuable and by the time I collapse into bed at the end of the day I am thoroughly exhausted.
There's always time for one more quick swim, one more hike, one more conversation.
Perhaps that's what I love most about these trips. It feels like there is always more.
Out there, nothing is lacking. There is never not enough. Even as we drive, I can feel the layers of heaviness surrounding my heart just melt away until we pull up to our little mountain kingdom and I am eye to eye, toe to toe with my real, honest self.
There's something about the truth that doesn't hide from me here.
This year we packed up the van and drove to our little mountain town. And even just sitting in the passenger seat of the boyfriend's truck with my bags packed and anticipation swirling around in the air, my heart almost burst at the thought of being surrounded by all the people I love so dearly for a whole weekend.
Sometimes, I think, this qualifies as magic.
There were mornings where all of us crammed into a tiny cabin to eat breakfast, still pajama clad and sleepy eyed. There were afternoons spent wading in the river, wandering through Jasper, swatting mosquitoes and hiking up to the old pool (which I still think is one of my favourite places on earth, and feels to me so much like poetry). There was kissing, and staying up late, jumping into the cold pool until all limbs were numb only to retreat back to the warm pool and sigh over the tingling feeling in hands and feet, stories were told and many rounds of catch played and over and over again I fell in love the way you fall asleep, slowly and then all at once.
I cried, because sometimes you can't hide from the truth. I collapsed from exhaustion. I let the mountain air and the sunshine heal my soul once again, and let it all remind me who I am.
I am so incredibly grateful for my family, and the memories we make in this place. I'm grateful that this year family stretched to include more of the people I love so much. I'm grateful for the life lessons learned around the breakfast table and over coffee and while sitting around with my people.
When I got my tattoo (a mountain) it symbolized a lot of things.
It was in memory of my cousin, an avid snowmobiler. His favourite place was in the mountains, and it was on this little mountain near Jasper that I have some of the best memories of our family.
It's because I feel most at home in the mountains, and to me they represent freedom and strength.
And it's because of that verse in Matthew that talks about having faith to move mountains.
As I spent this weekend loving, and telling the truth and healing my soul, my faith was also restored in some small way. My faith, not only in God, but in goodness and love and family and people, in the world and in myself.
If I could bottle up some of that magic I feel during our family trips to that mountain, I would. I would put it on a necklace and carry it with me every day.
We arrived home today, and I have new dreams tangled in my hair, fresh ideas stirring in my head and a wild, radical love taking root in my heart once again. I am so grateful for all of this.

"God is in the mountains. Impassible, immovable, jagged giants, separating the celestial from the terrestrial with eternal, diagonal certainty. As if silently monitoring the beating heart of the Creator from the universe's perfect birth. Stood in the thin air and the awe, one inhales God, involuntarily acknowledging that we are but fragments of a whole, a higher thing. The mountains remind me of my place, as a servant to truth and wonder. Yes, God is in the mountains. Perhaps the pulpit too and even in the piety of an atheist's sigh.  I don't know, but I feel him in the mountains."

On summer and love

It's June and I'm tired of being brave.

I started measuring my life in summers about 3 years ago.
The summer before my senior year of high school, I craved pleasure. I did anything I thought would make me happy. Which included making some very bad decisions, and getting involved with things and people I shouldn't have. Funny enough I don't regret any of those things. They didn't make me happy but they made me stronger. They were the gateway to discovering what I really needed to get happy.
Last summer, the one sandwiched between my last year of high school and my first year of college, I learned how to pray. It sounds funny because I've spent my whole life going to church, but I realized last summer that means I've spent my whole life fitting into other people's rituals. I saw people that prayed and read their Bibles and had these great spiritual encounters and that was it for them, and I thought that I should fit into that mold, but every time I tried it felt less like finding grace and more like guilt and it got to the point where I wondered if God even existed. I looked into other religions, and actually found some pretty interesting things. I encountered God for the first time in a coffee shop. I made more mistakes, had even more breakthroughs, and created rituals and prayers that made me feel closer to God, instead of what everybody else thought I should do. I guess in a way I kind of redefined what spirituality and Christianity and God meant to me. It's still sort of out of the box, and unconventional, but I'm happier now than I was.
This summer, well this summer is still writing itself on my heart, but it's shaping up to be about love. I fell in love in January, which in and of itself was a huge adventure. In April love traveled to a different city, and it became phone calls and text messages. Now it's June and love is back but not really, and it's taking on a new form all together. The walls of love are being redefined as I must redefine what it means to be a daughter, a sister, a granddaughter, a niece, a friend, a girlfriend and a survivor.  Relationships sure have a way of pulling at my heart, and sometimes it feels like pieces of my heart are no longer inside me but out there with the people I love and I can't seem to get all my heart in the same place. This summer has been a lot of time spent hunched over a notebook, or a keyboard, or anything I can get my hands on really trying to redefine what love means to me, the people I love and how love changes me.
Summer, though, always has a way of changing me, of breaking open my heart and forcing me to examine life and think about the hard things.
...
I was lucky enough to be able to attend the wedding of one of my friends this past Saturday. He married a beautiful girl, and I don't like to admit it but I cried at their wedding, because there are few things I find more beautiful than 2 people in love.
I remember the first time he told me about her, and how even then I think I knew because something in the way he talked about her was different.
...
There are a few things I've always been: independent, and emotional. I've spent a long time trying to make peace with these things.
I have a hard time confessing that I need people, maybe because part of me is convinced I still don't.
So a few days ago, when I confessed in a conversation with someone I love for the first time that maybe I need you I started to cry.
I've been trying to do more honest, real things lately. It's hard and heartbreaking and sometimes means crying at inopportune moments and having weird emotional reactions to just about everything. Something they never told me in school was that loving people is hard. It's not just hard because everyone you love holds a piece of your heart and its all just out there but because it's not always easy to choose to love people, or to allow them access to the ugliest parts of you and looking at their ugliest bits and trying to put them together to make something beautiful.
But even before I started dating, I always said I wanted love to be crazy and real or not at all. Perhaps I shouldn't have said that because that's literally what love is for me right now. It's crazy and real and messy and its full of fighting and crying and then loving and making up and it's close and it's far away and sometimes I wonder how my heart can stretch so far.
Sometimes, I guess, love looks a lot like saying "Maybe I need you."
...
A few nights ago I got to spend the evening with 2 lovely little girls. We painted pictures and told stories and talked about our dreams and laughed and it felt like I was spending time with old friends rather than 2 kids who had been placed in my care.
The whole night felt like magic, and I may have been guilty of wanting to keep them up past their bedtime so we could keep painting pictures and eating cereal and telling stories.
After they had gone to bed, I sat at the kitchen table and wrote about love.
Around the house were these little quotes, cut out and framed and oh so beautiful, and I couldn't help but notice as I marveled that many of them spoke of love.
Love, I decided, is something that must be insisted upon. Sometimes you have to put reminders in every room of the house, reminders to love well and that all of this heart opening is worth it because love is beautiful.
They always say love is a small word with big meanings but I never understood that until recently. Maybe I still don't understand it.
...
There's a canvas print hanging beside my bed with a quote from Gandhi. It says "Where there is love, there is life."
Love is hard, and there are moments when I feel it requires more of me than I have to give.
Love is also beautiful, breathtaking and life giving. Loving makes me brave, makes me strong, and sometimes it feels like the one thing I'm good at.
...
I sent him this message before he left for the week, the day after our conversation that included the words "Maybe I need you."
I said "I'm not good at a lot of things, and there are a lot of things someone else could do better than me, but one thing no one else can do is love you like I do."
And sometimes love makes me feel like the luckiest girl in the world. Because why do I get to love and be loved this much?

It Takes a Village

I've heard it said at baby dedications and during conversations about parenting.
It takes a village to raise a child.
But I never realized how true that was until recently.
This past little while has been a trying one for me. My heart was broken in one fowl swoop, in shattering seconds I never expected.
And the past week has been about trying to pick up the pieces. It's meant a lot of private writings, reflections, crying, mind numbing Netflix marathons when I couldn't think anymore, and sometimes brokenly worshipping.
My prayers have often sounded a whole lot like Dear God, I don't understand. I'm broken. I can't do this. Help me.
A few years ago an amazing friend and mentor of mine told me that when words fail to simply pray Jesus, and I don't think she knows how much those small words of wisdom have meant to me in these last few years, especially in the times when it feels like my heart is breaking and I have no words.
I watch relationships change and my own heart is weathering it's own personal storm and what I know about love is changing.
I sat in church this morning, coffee in hand, and it felt like the words were being whispered over my dry, barren heart:
Come to me all who are weary and burdened and I will give you rest
And I don't know which part of that sounds better - the invitation for the weary and burdened or the promise of rest.
What I know about love is changing, yes, but I realized something else this morning.
Love is everywhere. It surrounds me, exists on every corner, and maybe it doesn't look the same as it once did but maybe it doesn't have to. Is it enough to believe in love at all?
This morning as I sat and listened and cried and prayed and held and worshipped, I thought about the love that surrounds me.
I never really understood the saying that it takes a village to raise a child but I do now. I'm not necessarily a child anymore, in the throes of learning how to read and write, but I see that it does take a village to raise up a person.
Without the love, support, tenderness and care extended to me by so many I am convinced I would still be down. It's easier to lay on the ground, to not make an effort to get up, to let defeat win one more time. What a good community does is they extend their hands, reaching down, pulling you up, proclaiming a strong "No" over your desire for defeat.
Their love, found on every corner, gives me strength to believe in love again. It points me back to the ultimate source of love.
And I am so grateful.
For the ones who step in, and step up, I am so grateful for you.
It truly does take a village, and I am so lucky to have you in mine.

Whales and Chicks

I read a story a couple of days ago about a man who hugged a whale.
The way he was positioned against the whale made it possible for him to feel her heartbeat as she lay in waist deep water, held up by strangers.
During certain periods in my life certain words hold special meaning, and for me the last few months have been about vulnerability.
I've been forced to become vulnerable and honest with myself and with the people I love. I can feel my body physically responding to the strong emotions my heart is processing, and at times I want to throw my hands up and admit that it's all too much.
I wrote after reading this story that I feel like the whale - 300. I'm almost ready to give up fighting. I'm tired, and my heart aches over stories I hear and can do nothing about and the act of caring literally gets inside of my body. I can't fight the injustices - on a personal or global level - on my own. And I'm psychologically tired as well as physically tired and the only thing I can do is surrender myself into the hands of those gathered around me, to be willing to be vulnerable and trust that these people are here to help me instead of hurt me.
But, I wrote, I also feel like the man. I am aware I am holding something precious in my hands, and I know that we are all connected and that this moment is a gift, even if it is disguised and disfigured at the moment.
Ever since I can remember my grandpa has gotten baby chicks. They are small and fluffy and fit perfectly in the palm of your hand. There are the feisty ones and the quieter ones, the scared and the brave. And this year as I knelt down to pick up a baby chick, all of them huddled together in the corner, I imagined how scared they must be, in a whole new environment and separated from their mothers. To them, I am just another giant shadow, another large hand scooping them up out of what they know. They don't know that I only wish to hold them. There was something almost victorious about the moment when one baby chick fell asleep in my hands.
The vulnerability expressed by that chick, that whale, it makes me wonder if humans really are the best in the animal kingdom.
Because even though I know now the benefits of being vulnerable, something in me is still hesitant. The idea of radical honesty, with others and myself, is still terrifying.
The past few months for me have been another journey into vulnerability. It's uncomfortable, and exhausting. I feel like 300, knowing in a way that the only way to survive the aching of the teaching process is to stop fighting it and breathe. I feel like the baby chick, knowing I must trust the hands that hold me. I feel like the man, knowing that we are all a part of something bigger than ourselves and in my hands I hold a gift.
If caring too much is the thing that is splitting open my heart, I suppose there are worse ways to be broken open.
So be it, Lord, may I be broken for love's sake

What love looks like

I've been hesitant to write much about my relationship publicly God knows I write about it everywhere else, extensively. If you're my friend, or my hairdresser, or some random person who approaches me and asks what's new in my life, chances are you've heard about it. I've never been one of those people who is good at keeping secrets, or loving people quietly. I'm a writer, which means its kind of my job to take every feeling and analyze it. So why haven't I written much about my current relationship? Maybe because a part of me still fears what people will say. By not writing publicly about it, it still feels small and private, like I can protect it. Like anything I write that's super personal, it's scary to let it out and let other people think what they will about it. But I'm also trying this new thing where I stop living out of fear and start living from a place of love, and truth. So, that being said, I wrote a little something on love...

Love looks different now then it did a few months ago.
It looks different then it did 4 weeks ago and it looks very different then it did in January and in just a few short weeks it will look different again.
Did I mention I'm not a girl who likes change? Did I mention that every time love changes ever so slightly I slip into this place of freaking out and thinking everything is ending?
I know a lot of people who could probably write this post better than I could, people who have been in relationships longer than I have, people who understand how love changes better than I do.
But I'm not called to write about other people's stories. The only story about change and love and God I know how to write is my own. And it is my own story that I am deeply, profoundly grateful for.
For a while love looked like sitting on the couches. After meals, before his PWE or after mine, in the stolen moment we carved out in the evenings.
Love looked like card games (or more accurately, one card game played numerous times) and country music
Love looked like long drives down back roads with Starbucks in one hand and his hand in the other.
Love was awkward, learning new things, feeling so happy I couldn't contain it and ended up with a pile of girls huddled together in the dorm bathroom late at night wanting to hear how it all went.
And then he left, and love looked different. And my inability to lean into change left me wondering if there was any way I could do this.
Because they say long distance is hard, but I thought they meant for other people. I thought a few months apart couldn't be that bad. I clearly underestimated how all this change pushed at me within the span of a few days would cause me to spend hours curled up in the fetal position feeling rather hopeless and wishing the summer would just end already so I could return to being surrounded by spirituality, my friends and my 'easier' relationship. I quickly learned that, among other things, long distance is hard.
Love began to look like text messages with spelling mistakes and phone calls that lasted for hours every Tuesday night.
Love was the hours I stayed up praying when he was wrestling with the tough questions, and the times he texted me continuously when I was having a rough moment and crying in a closet somewhere.
Love became "I can do this without you but I'm realizing I don't want to."
Love looks different now than it did during the long college days. And in a few weeks, when he comes back, it will look different again. And once school starts again in September we will enter yet another season where love looks a little different.
And there are moments when all this change is enough to make me curl up in a ball convinced there is absolutely no way I can do this. Someone picked the wrong girl. I never signed up for this hard.
But it's the this hard that is changing the way I look at love. The this hard is making me grateful for the lingering days of less hard we had. It's making me look forward to the future so much more. And the this hard, it is totally and completely worth it.
Because love looks different now, but that doesn't mean it's not there. At least that's what I'm learning.
Learning to love is a crazy journey, one I'm honored to be on. And maybe its just me but I want to be learning to love for a really long time.

The Poetry of Pain

Most of the magic in my life has happened when my heart is shattered
Yesterday I was bracing myself for impact.
The exhaustion and weakness and subtle sadness were there, but I had this idea that if I could just keep pushing, just keep moving forward, I could narrowly escape their grasp.
After all, it's not supposed to hurt anymore, right? Or maybe it's supposed to hurt but only for them, not me.
It is in these moments I deny myself honesty. I put on the brave face of "I'm ok" and keep walking. Or I smile and say "It's a rough day" but don't actually allow myself to be cared for.
In the moments after supper, I snuck away to an upstairs room. It was the only place I found that was quiet, the smell of coffee beans still in the air. I curled up on the couch, looking out over the setting sun, and began to write.
I'd been in hiding for a while before he found me. All curled up there, I felt smaller than usual. He kept asking me what I was thinking and I didn't know. So many thoughts were inside my head, some loud and pressing others quiet and aching.
Randomly I would laugh, about something dark or something random. I think it's the body's way of coping, when you produce an excess amount of one emotion the body produces a great amount of the opposite emotion to counteract it.
In all of it I was feeling less and less like myself, but unable to fully understand where myself had gone.
He sat with me, and she came and brought with her Kraft Dinner, which we ate on the couch straight from the pot with two spoons while listening to really bad pop songs.
And something about this made it all ok.
In this moment I wasn't trying to justify what I felt, or hide it, but instead I was sitting directly in the middle of it.
I had written earlier that I felt like I was trying to hold both the light and the dark, but these two conflicting emotions cannot sit with each other and so I am forced to pick one, but even though I pick one it doesn't mean the other doesn't exist.
Just because I choose to focus on the positive story doesn't mean my heart doesn't break over the darkness. And just because from time to time I must sit in the darkness and allow it room to exist it doesn't mean the light is not just over there.
My friends make me honest. They sit with me in my darkness, and feed me and laugh with me until I'm ok again, until the shadow has passed. They make me brave, brave enough to sit in this moment and not try to change it, or shelter myself or anyone else from it.
And I don't know if they will ever know how grateful I am for that tiny moment.


He will change your heart of stone into a heart of flesh. That sounds exciting. But instead of saying a heart of flesh you say a vulnerable heart. It sounds less exciting. And if you want to define vulnerability as the capacity of being hurt. so I'll change your heart of stone which is protective into a heart where you will be capable of being hurt, that sounds less exciting

This morning in Sunday School we made blessings. I carefully chose a word, a blessing, for each of my precious girlies. And then, as a last minute addition, I allowed them to pick a word for me. Each of them picked something they saw embodied in me, something they wished for me.
Awesomeness
Peace
Honesty
Love

It makes total sense that Jesus would be the Son of God because people would want love to be like unicorns and rainbows. And so then you send Jesus and people go "Oh, love is hard. Love is sacrifice. Love is eating with the sick, it's breaking bread. Love is trouble. Love is rebellious
Love is not a victory march, its a cold and broken hallelujah

Love is found in the moments when people show up. It's blessings spoken over a tired heart by little girls with big eyes and bigger dreams. It's friends who come up just to eat Kraft Dinner and listen to stupid music on YouTube and laugh with you. It's saying yes.
Love is pain too. It's messy. It's the capability for being hurt and when love ends it can feel like the world should stop turning.
Love is a cold and broken hallelujah. It's not always easy.
Entering into another person's brokenness isn't easy. Watching the people you love make bad decisions hurts.
But love, I think, is pretty magical. It's poetry - the only kind I know how to write these days.
It's showing up and saying "How can I help?" and "I'm here."
Love is poetry. Pain is poetry. This week I got to experience both.
And the collision of love and pain in the same instant, let me tell you something, is pretty magical.

planted dreams & the beautiful right now

Tonight I sat curled up in a coffee shop.
"Want to play cards? You look bored."
But I wasn't. I was watching, observing, feeling, thinking, savoring.
If someone wants to see what school is like, I thought, they should see this. This moment, this delicate picturesque thing where over in the corner there's the guys playing cards and in the back girls are hunched over their lattes and everything's buzzing ever so slightly and in all of it I echo words I've said so many times this month.
If this isn't beautiful, I don't know what is
I'm a people watcher. I'm fascinated by people and their uniqueness and their stories. And I was more than content to sit back with my latte and observe the loudness and softness of people.
As I sat, drink in hand, I was smiling. For this brief moment in time, no one needed anything from me. My blood, my time, my attention, my arms, my ability to scare monsters out of closets and smile, my mental capacity or my brain. I felt like in this moment I was just existing, filling myself up by indulging in the secret art of people watching.
...
During the past few days I've sat before a blank screen multiple times, trying to put thoughts to paper.
When I started this humble little blog, I thought I would fill it with all my adventures. I would write my way through heartache and happiness. I would fill my corner of the world with rambling prose and stories.
I was, after all, going to be a story teller.
I said it with some degree of awe. I whispered it at first, the idea of being an anything too much for my weak heart to comprehend.
When I started writing, it was my survival song. I wrote compulsively and out of desperation. I wrote because it was and is the only way I know how to analyze the world.
I write to document, to save, to fully experience and embrace a fleeting moment.
Writing stories saved me. I still have the first story I wrote: with shaky penmanship it was a love story I was desperate to believe in.
When I thoroughly exhausted myself in making up stories, I became a poet. My guilty pleasure became locking myself in the closet and listening to spoken word poetry. I sat in the dark until tears streamed down my face. I wrote poems until my fingers bled, then wrote the poems bloody.
Now my rambling prose has taken on a new form. I write, but mostly for myself. I write to process my thoughts, to feel, to savor.
I don't write with the same desperation I used to.
I'm getting to a place where I don't need to compulsively write to remember. I don't write to make myself believe I am something.
I'm many things. I'm a story teller, always. I'm an asker of questions and I'm a people watcher. I'm a daughter and sister and friend and girlfriend and a child of God. I'm in constant pursuit of the person He made me to be, and I'm doing my best to love fully the people and things He's given me.
I'm still the poet, but I'm learning I'm also the poem.
...
We're in the final days before Reading week. 3/4 of the way done the school year and I'm savoring the moments. 6 months ago I never imagined I'd wind up here: having somehow stumbled upon my home team, the people I call when something goes wrong or when I just need help.
In September I wrote on my puzzle piece words from a poem by Sierra DeMulder. They weren't my words, but over the months I've claimed them.
Dear you, whoever you are, however you got here, this is exactly where you're supposed to be
I didn't believe it. This story I'm in, it was meant for somebody else. Right?
But being here, I'm learning that this story is mine, that it's ok to believe that by some twist of fate you are worthy of good things.
I'm learning to laugh, loudly and often. And I'm learning to feel things, the broken and the beautiful and let it move me.
I'm learning that if you let them, sometimes people will surprise you.
Sometimes the girls you were assigned to become the girls who show up with chocolate and cards and arms that are willing to embrace every joy and sorrow.
Sometimes the guy who was just a friend becomes the guy who looks at you like you're magic and holds your hand and makes you laugh.
This is my home team. We've celebrated birthdays and engagements and new relationships, held each other through death and homework stress and breakups.
They say "Let me help" and "I love you" and "I brought you coffee"
I don't know what I did to deserve these people. But I am so grateful they're mine, and that they keep showing up and bringing coffee and holding my hand and reminding me who I am when I forget
...
My life is pretty beautiful these days. These are the tender days of becoming, of trusting and holding and growing and feeling and loving.
It's in these soft, stretching moments I'm finding out what my life is really about, and who I am.
I never thought I'd make it here. My heart was broken in a thousand different ways and I was the girl grasping for just one dream.
Now I'm here, and all I can say is "My God, isn't this beautiful?"
He asks me what I'm thinking and all I can say is that I'm grateful for this. I squeeze his hand.
I am grateful. I get to experience daily the work God does in a broken heart, the new dreams He plants in barren fields.
I don't know where my life is headed. All I know is right now, in all it's fragile beauty. So I'm savoring each moment and letting my life become the poem.
I'm saying thank you when I can and telling my people just how much they mean to me. And every once in a while I step back and see all that is, and all I whisper "If this isn't beautiful I don't know what is."

And all the good things

It was on my to-do list for today: blog. Right after unpack boxes, check answers for assignment and spend 30 minutes in prayer for my part of the school's 60 hours of continual prayer.
I was thinking about what to write, my head spinning with all kinds of ideas.
But as I sit here with my laptop open, the sound of the train in the background, I realize I don't know what to write.
Not because there isn't things going on I could write about. In fact, it is in this very season that my heart is more full than it's ever been. It's because in this tender, precious season of becoming I am treasuring tiny moments, savoring the sweetness, giving gratitude for the grace days.
...
I was talking last night about writing.
"I might write about you," I warned him.
Because I tend to write about things. Good things, bad things, things that matter and things that don't, all of it gets written down and documented and saved.
But I haven't been writing things down as much as I normally do. I write down moments, memories, the sound of voices and the reflections carried in a set of eyes and things that make me laugh, but it's a more personal kind of writing. It's not to document, not sinking the memories in formaldehyde to try and preserve them for as long as I can.
No, this kind of writing is more about savoring, about taking all these moments and pondering them in my heart.
...
Last night I worked in the coffee shop. It's crazy and busy and sometimes incredibly fast paced and the whole place smells like coffee beans and milk and there's usually music playing and I love it.
There's something about using my hands to make the coffee to fill the cup to make the design on the top to give it to the person on the other side of the counter.
But it's more than just giving someone a drink. That isn't the moment I love the most.
It's not the smell of ground beans or the little accidents that we laugh off or the way we get to have fun while we work.
It's that one moment of eye contact when you pass someone their drink. It's that opportunity to; make something and make it with love because that person you're making it for is special and valuable and I know you can't say all that with a coffee but sometimes I try.
It's the way people connect. It's the opportunity to serve and nourish the people I care about.
Last night when I was working someone asked me if I liked working in the coffee shop. I've only worked a couple of times, and am still learning, and there are often moments when I feel like I have no idea what I'm doing.
But I said yes. Yeah, I do love it. Because I love seeing people brought together, and being given the opportunity to care for people in coffee cups.
...
This week is Spiritual Emphasis week at PRBI. It means every day we get a special Chapel, and then on Friday we have no classes and instead have day of prayer. During this week, we also were given the opportunity to participate in 60 hours of continual prayer.
I signed up for 2 half hour slots. I didn't know how I was going to fill half an hour, but decided to give it a shot. After all, how hard could it be?
Today I didn't feel like praying. My mind was spinning, my heart was full. Lots of changes have been happening in my life recently, changes that I'm pondering and mulling over and figuring out.
As I set out on my prayer walk I slipped on the ice, fell in a puddle, decided I probably should have worn a thicker sweater and my mind was too preoccupied to focus on prayer.
As I walked, I began to whisper. Not extravagant, beautiful prayers all dressed up and neat but humble pleadings and questionings.
I don't know the direction my life is headed in. Whenever I am given grace my first instinct is to be afraid of the moment when it will be taken away. It's too good to be true, I reason.
I went down winding streets and up old dirt roads and the whole time I was mumbling and murmuring. I felt afraid. Afraid of the future, and the unknowns, and even of the happiness that seems to be invading every corner of my life these days. I was afraid of the what if's, and the maybes, and the possible rejections and endings and that in all this goodness I will become lost.
I was walking and I hit this spot of sunshine on the bridge and I was just standing there, and for a single moment I felt seen. I felt heard, and noticed.
I felt a small whisper inside of me saying, "Do you not see that all of this you have been given is just a reflection of my love for you?"
I've been letting my fear be bigger than my faith.
A friend called me on it the other day. She said that all these new changes in my life are just adding. They just mean more love, more good, more happy. And I can't fully embrace the more if I'm still stuck in the less. I can't be full of faith if I'm listening to the lies of fear. I can't be happy if I'm still insistent on being right about the lies I've told myself all these years.
I want to be that kind of person who chooses addition over subtraction. I want to silence the fears and enter into all this crazy love that is being offered to me.
I was reminded of an Elizabeth Gilbert quote as I was walking back that says "Sometimes it is necessary to lose balance for love."
Sometimes it is necessary to put all those old beliefs and fears and the desire for control on the shelf so that you can fully embrace love.
...
These days I'm finding myself grateful. My life is all kinds of beautiful. There are so many moments I can't write about, not yet, as I am still savoring them myself. I was sitting by the window the other night staring up at the moon and I was completely overwhelmed with grace, and how even these first few weeks of 2015 have richly blessed me and how this kind of overwhelming goodness is rich and beautiful and scary and wild and thrilling all at the same time.
And how I'm so grateful. My heart is so full it feels like it might burst. And how this new stage in my life is about learning and growing and loving and embracing and becoming. It's my own personal journey of becoming that is expanding beyond myself and is creating something beautiful.
My phone vibrated in my pocket.
In the moonlight I made out the words of the text message: Cards?
Yeah, my life is pretty good

The stories I tell myself in the dark (and the light of love)

There are stories. Lots of them. Stories I've clung to long after their expiration dates because when they fall they sound like broken plates and I've never liked broken glass.
Stories: like the world is not safe, that love is a small, dark cage, like I am not deserving of the love they put on a shelf and label healthy and good.
I live from these stories, from the one main idea that love is not safe and good. I live them out, carry them into every relationship. I wield my fears like a battle axe, locking myself away like a princess in the tower because I am so deathly afraid of being free.
What would happen if I believed love was good and safe? What would happen if I lived from a place of unconditional love rather than unconditional fear, regret and shame? What if the story I marched into every relationship, every moment, was one of love rather than one of being afraid?
My head spins with possibilities of being hurt, being left, being abandoned. This is all I know of love, and the idea of this love being the story I tell and live out feels unsafe, dangerous.
But what would happen if I stepped out on a limb and believed there is a love greater than what I've been shown?
Recently God has been bringing to mind over and over the story of Hosea. It's one of my favorites. The lover never stops pursuing the one He loves. Wild, relentless, strong, unconditional.
For a while I saw myself as Gomer, Hosea's wife, the one who flees over and over.
I am the one with the scarlet letter, with the dirty hands and multitude of scars.
But when I look at the story this way, I miss a big part of the story.
When I look at it through my lenses I see a story of Gomer fleeing over and over, and Hosea, exhausted and fed up, going once again to win her back. I look at it the same way I look at all my relationships, all my circumstances. I've messed up too much, love is an obligation.
But the story isn't about what I know of love. It isn't about Gomer's failing, or even Hosea's pursuit of her. It is a love letter between God and the people He loves.
It is God's love letter for me. And it encourages me to drop my stories, set down my lenses and see what's really there.
Not a man fed up and exhausted by the fleeing of his lover but of a man so consumed with love for this individual that nothing can tear them apart.
An unconditional love, a love that never runs out, a love where there is always more, a love that is kind and deep and wide and forever.
This is the love I am challenged to believe in. Not a love that fails but a love that frees. Not a love that hurts and scars and ends when I mess up but a love where there is always more, where it becomes a happily ever after and after and after and after and there is no way to reach the limit. A love that pursues, that yearns for, that desires, that doesn't care how much you've failed because love is bigger than all of that. Love covers and wipes clean and says "I want you, right now, just as you are."
This is the love I am asked to believe in. Instead of letting my stories of what love is define me and hold me captive, I am asked to make room for the stories of a love that frees.

Loveness

For one of our classes we're working our way through this book, meeting each week with another to discuss these tiny gems we draw from our weekly readings.
Most weeks I take tiny slivers of something to hold up to the light as the week passes, then promptly move on to the next virtue. But this, this one stuck out to me a little extra, shone a little brighter.
Thanksgiving
We made a challenge, for one whole day in the next week to notice every single time we said thank you and stop to ask why we were thankful.
And for a whole day I walked around being truly thankful for doors being held open and salt shakers being passed at dinner.
It reminded me of 1000 gifts, and how months ago I filled a little blue notebook with things I was grateful for, and how life got busy and the gratitude list became just another thing on my bigger to-do list and I stuck the little blue book on the shelf.
1. The patience of friends
2. Laughing voices coming from down the hallway
3. Big hugs as we say goodbye
4. Starry nights
One by one I create another list, naming the things in which I am grateful.
I'm nearing 100 now, 100 little gifts reminding me that all is grace.
I'm writing again, wild and rambling prose about people and love and coffee stains.
About this place in which I currently find myself, full of soft hands taking hold of mine and the space I've been feeling that surrounds my heart and the mystery of the unknown.
21. Physical closeness
22. Strong Brewed Coffee
23. Long walks down winding roads
24. Tiny eyes, wide and bright
I'm learning what it means to be loved. Sometimes I forget, and it takes the gentle reminder from a friend to bring my mind back to this. I'm learning it's ok to make mistakes and sometimes it's ok to let go. I'm learning that sometimes it takes being brought to the same place over and over again to finally learn, and sometimes when you think you know it all there comes the realization that there is (always) more left to learn.
47. Snowflakes falling on a Sunday
48. Her head tucked against my shoulder
49. Color coordination at the breakfast table
I'm being challenged to be honest, to be willing to get vulnerable and exposed, to spread open the parts of me I am most ashamed of and sit with them. I am being challenged not to stay here, where my own shortcomings, failures and humanness seem to be illuminated, but to rise.
Challenged to truly exist in this moment and make memories and keep living and loving with a heart flung wide open and to recognize that all this is grace
Elizabeth Gilbert says "Whatever comes and lifts your face out of the dirt and says 'rise, rise, rise' that is grace."
72. Words
73. Impromptu dance parties
I am falling in love with the world more and more each day. With strong hands and soft eyes and small gestures and words and sounds and people, always people. Sometimes all this loving makes me feel as though my heart is going to fracture under the weight of it all. I love too fiercely, too deeply, too quickly and passionately and wildly, and sometimes this causes bruises and cuts and I lay on the carpet wondering why I have loved at all. The challenge in these moments is to remain open, to keep on loving and letting myself be loved in different forms.
83. The silence of early morning
84. Clay under my fingers
85. Opportunity
Someone asked me once what I wanted my legacy to be, and I'll always remember what I said. I stole the phrase from Jennifer Pastiloff, and it is still one of the truest things I know.
"When I get to the end of my life and ask one final 'What have I done?' let my answer be 'I have done love.''
I want to have done love. I want to have loved well, but I also want to have loved badly and fully and passionately and messy and like crazy and the right people at the wrong time and the wrong people at the right time and myself.
I want to always experience love so completely it almost breaks my heart.
At the end of this day, when the clock has already ticked on to morning and exhaustion is in my bones from all the messy loving I did today, when I am vaguely aware of the still broken pieces of myself being made whole, I add one more thing to my list in delicate black ink script
91. Love
I am grateful for love

What I know for sure (You are loved)

There are days when I wish I could write a thank you letter to the world, sign it your not so secret admirer.
But if I sat down to write a thank you letter to every single person and thing that has made me happy over these last few days, I would run out of room.
It would sound a lot like this:
I'm thankful to my little group in English class, who makes waking up early and coming to school every morning that much better.
I'm thankful for the Melodic Caring Project, for making me feel like a rock star. They are a beautiful organization that I am so proud to be a part of (You guys should check them out. I just wrote my first piece for their blog, and I'll post the link once that's up)
I'm thankful for sunny days and good hair days and days when I get to go shopping with my mama
I'm thankful for poetry and Starbucks and dirty feet from walking barefoot
...
She asked me why I don't seem to get stressed, and something about the way she said it stuck with me all day. She said I always look so calm.
I told her I do get stressed, but just about different things.
If I'm being totally honest, the idea of someone seeing me as calm is a beautiful one, because it's taken me so long to get to that place where I do have these moments of serenity
It's taken so many sleepless nights, lots of yoga, lots of being still, lots of being loud, amazing friends, poetry and having lived through those dark days
And I'm not naïve enough to think that there won't be more
There will be
There will be days when it feels like my entire world is collapsing in and I cannot breathe due to the weight of it all
But I've also experienced silver linings, happiness in the little things.
Maybe if I was writing this right now from a place of depression it would sound a little different. But just having come out of one of those places, one of those periods of being so fully aware of your own brokenness it gets hard to breathe, I know that while the brokenness exists, painfully so, and it is overwhelming at times, you have to believe things can get better than they are now.
This is a letter to everyone who has ever felt broken. This is a letter to myself, because I need to hear it.
She said she's not so sure she believes in love anymore, and I've been there too
Just a few months ago I probably would have said something similar.
But right now I know love is the only thing I know for sure.
I so often forget, but there are days when I am overwhelmed by it.
Love is what I know for sure.
It is something I have to keep reminding myself of, something I don't always feel like I deserve. It's like the wind: I can't see it but I know it's there.
If I had one thing to say to my friend, it would be this: You are loved, more than you can imagine.

Where I stood

The sun warmed my shoulders as I sat at the kitchen table, listening to Missy Higgins and writing about nostalgia and hope and grief and everything beautiful.
March has been good to me, in a way I never expected.
The first words I wrote this month, as it came to me full of untold secrets, were "I'm not great at ending things."
It began quietly unfolding as I wrote of bad haircuts, watching Julia Robert's movies and saying goodbye. I wrote about grief, pain, still (always) trying to analyze the hole in my chest that came from losing too many people and things that I love.
I fought with myself, constantly wrestling against the idea that there had to be something more, examining my pain under a microscope and trying to make sense of it.
I tried to find myself amidst the unknown, often stumbling over my own edges.
And then there came a moment, and maybe they all come something like this, where I tripped over myself and fell into what I had been looking for.
For a brief moment in time, there was nothing left to say. No apologies sneaking out in the form of poetry, no love letters slipping out of the pen every time it hit the paper. There was just the sound of my heart, and I was learning how to listen to it.
During this month of March I often fought between my heart and my head. I felt like I needed constant reassurance that everything was ok and that I was ok.
And I encountered something I am still trying to explain, and can only describe as radical grace.
In my running away from myself I ran face first, full speed into radical grace, radical faith, radical love and hope.
I had some real, honest conversations with people about my life and where I've been and where I want to go, and maybe I was a little bit surprised by the responses I got. Because sometimes if you give people a chance, they will surprise you and it will be great.
For the first time in forever I realized how loved I am (even if that's something I am still trying to understand)
I laughed and cried and struggled and fought against myself and for myself a lot this month. I got real, got scared, got excited, got honest, got loved.
And I made some big decisions about my future, which are slowly unfolding into something beautiful.
For me, I think March was about beginning that journey to find myself, and listening to my heart and being honest about that. And while that's been my intention I definitely experienced it in a really real and crazy way.
Listening to Missy Higgins and writing in the sunshine was a perfect way for me to wrap up this beautiful, crazy month of grace.
And while I don't know what the next month or few months or year will hold for me I can only hope it involves more of this radical kind of love, and grace and faith. I can only hope it involves more of this being cracked open, because this, I am learning, is how the light gets in.
Even if it's painful
Even if it's hard
I am learning to open myself up to the light and to love and to others and to myself


Sit down on the top there. After all, you climbed all the way up. You did that. Not me. Not your past. You: here and now. It was a steep climb and you almost fell but you didn't. Go on and sit down. And when the trees ask you to stay awhile, tell them "yes, yes, I plan to. In fact, I have always been here. I have always been the light

Here's to love

Here's to messy love, the kind that leaves you with a broken heart, extreme emotions
Here's to family love, and the amazing people who make up mine and  remind me that family isn't just where you come from, it's where you belong
Here's to friend love, and the beautiful, crazy individuals who laugh with me, cry with me, learn with me, share with me, and support me even when I don't deserve it
Here's to your first love, and the boy who takes your breath away
Here's to your last love, someday, and the person who loves you when you're young and also when you're older
Here's to all the loves in between, the people who hold your heart, and sometimes break it, and all they teach you along the way
Here's to the first person who gave me a valentine
Here's to loving yourself
Here's to loving other people
Here's to being loved
Here's to the old ones, the young ones, the free spirits and the workaholics, to everyone who is waiting to be loved and not realizing they already are
Here's to the newlyweds, and the couples who have been married for 50 years
Here's to the people who fight for love
Here's to the people love crept up on
Here's to sisters and brothers and mothers and fathers and friends and boyfriends and girlfriends and husbands and wives and memories
Here's to love, in every shape and form, because it is all beautiful

Love (An open letter to the boys I've loved)

For all the boys who asked me if I was writing about you, I was :)


It's four simple letters, two vowels, all strung together in a row like the popcorn I threaded together and strung on the tree every Christmas
L O V E
It sounds like it should be simple, like the pattern of consonant and vowel should run together smoothly, feeling like  pebbles on the inside of my cheeks
If only if it was that easy
If only the letters strung together made sunshine instead of tsunami tides, gave me a place to write my name in the mountains of it all, tying myself to the cliff so that when I fall I won't crack my head open on the earth below
See, I've never been good at this thing they call love
Maybe it's because I have selfishness inside of my bones, forces of nature that line up to create the worst storm you've ever seen
Maybe it's because I come from the place where the wild things are, unprecedented with stars in my hair and ashes stuck to the bottom of my shoes
The first boy I ever loved I met when I was 14. He told me I was pretty, spent time with me in a kitchen that wasn't ours, sat on the counter and watched as I learned what it meant not to be afraid. The first boy I ever loved made me brave
The second boy I ever loved made me weak in the knees, gave me butterflies and reminded me that inside of me is parts of nature I often forget to see. When he left it was the worst motion sickness I've ever known
The third boy I ever loved was in love with someone else. He knit me together, using the backs of his hands as blueprints for how one is supposed to be, tying me together, trying to create perfection. Someone forgot to tell him that he wasn't God and you can't turn people into houses.
The fourth boy I ever loved showed me the power of hurricanes, the steel strength of pouring rain, he made me believe in magic. And a world that exists beyond my line of sight, that there is always something over the horizon, you just have to find it
Five. His eyes found me in a crowded room
Six. He talked to me like I hung the moon, like stars shot out of my fingertips every time I sat down to write and said when I spoke he could see the milky way
Seven I loved when I was lonely, on the nights when he refused to give up on me and let me slip into oblivion
Eight. Apparently I smiled whenever she said his name. He asked me what my political stance was like it was a pick up line. He pretended like he saw galaxies inside of my eyes
The ninth boy I loved, well I didn't love him. I dove into him like you dive into a swimming pool filled with water, trying to lose myself in him.
Love leaves me broken, having given everything inside of me, offering it out in cupped hands, having it never be enough. I am lying on the carpet, naked and trying to remember who I was before I loved you. I'm trying to remember what it was like when the names of boys weren't scribbled all over my diary, when I didn't write love poems for boys I'd only just met, when I was enough for myself
When I didn't feel the brokenness that comes with being alone, the morning after he leaves you, when it's just not working out or you've done it too many times and he's had enough, after screaming and name calling and crying into the dark, when the sound of the toaster makes you jump. I've written too many poems about what happens after you love someone, how the pain can linger for days, like a sword slicing it's way down your body, when you're using a sewing needle to try and suture your heart back in your chest
There's a reason I said I wasn't good at love and it wasn't because I thought I would be happier alone
It's because I'm tired of writing poems about the boys who break my heart, the ones who say my name like its magic and then hold it over me like it's the thing monsters are made of, don't say I didn't warn you.
When you say my name like it's the cure, please listen to me when I tell you it's not really.

This is not a love story

I've never been good at writing love stories.
Mostly because I don't know how to be in love.
I've done it before. I've loved. Some may say I love too much. I love passionately and quickly and fiercely and with the awkward clumsiness of a newborn foal.
I love until it hurts too much and the feelings threaten to crack my heart wide open.
I love until I feel like a fish beneath frozen ice.
See, it's all poetry and stars and breathtaking moments. Until it isn't.
I love like a lightning storm.
So no, I've never been good at writing love stories because I never can finish them.
I have this folder on my desktop for unfinished love stories.
It's about how every time I'm lonely, or nostalgic, I send letters to poets I've never met because maybe their words feel like a supernova exploding in their veins too.
It's about how I fall in love with moments, bits and pieces of people. Her eyes, the way he looked when he held her hand, the way he smelled.
It's about the little bird who has built a nest inside of the cage composed of my ribs and sometimes I can feel him, fluttering. His wings beat against my bone and I know he wants to get out and taste sunshine as badly as I do.
Its about how I am not a girl who is easily loved.
I've been told that before.
I'm a mosaic of broken glass, jagged edges and rough sides. I feel too much and I love too much and I carry stories that don't belong to me inside of my body because I don't know how not to.
I collect moments. I drink my coffee black.
I tried it with cream once and it tasted too easy, too simple.
I am always pulling at my nails and I can never manage to keep my room clean and I write on sticky notes and find them in places I'd never expect and chances are if I know you I'll probably fall in love with you.
At least part of you.
I'll love you until the supernova explodes and its too much work to pick up the broken pieces and I have this fear of getting hurt that makes me tread carefully, treating relationships like land mines.
Maybe I wasn't made for staying.
Maybe there's always been this part of me that's meant for leaving.
Maybe there's always been this part of me that never knew how to write a love story.

All You Need Is Love

She set her head on the desk and leaned her cheek against the smooth surface and closed her eyes, for a brief minute falling into a world where nothing hurt.

 The legs of his chair banged against the floor as he moved to sit as close to her as the plastic surfaces they sat on would allow, wrapping his arms around her waist and resting his cheek against her shoulder.

And this moment was like a drug to her, like an intravenous drip running into her veins restoring her faith in humanity and kindness and beauty and the world slowly and all at once. And his arms around her were like a shelter, a fortress that when the winds raged outside of her windows and the rain beat against the panes and the world was carrying on as if it was in the middle of a hurricane, kept her safe and dry. And inside his arms the world made sense and sometimes when the world is hard all it takes to give you that push to keep going is knowing that someone is on your side.

It’s a pair of arms to go home to after a long day and it’s the hand to hold as you walk through the hallways of a place where everyone is trying to convince you to be someone other than yourself. And it’s those eyes that return you to your center, even when you feel as though you’ve lost your island and you’re lost in this storm with the raging winds and the rain. It’s having a person, someone who believes in you when you don’t quite believe in yourself and someone who reminds you of all the reasons why you’re worth loving when you seem to have forgotten them.

And it’s the harbor and it’s coming home and to her, he was all of that. And as he wrapped his arms around her and ran his fingers through her hair and kissed her pale skin, he was reminding her of the million and one ways she deserved to be loved.

And sometimes the world hits hard and the raging storm becomes a hurricane, a force of nature like no other, and it’s all anyone can do to stay standing. And sometimes the harbor cracks under the pressure and it just becomes two children lost in a storm. And so she cradles his head in her hands, pouring back into him the strength he infused into her. She moves her hands in small, meticulous circles over his ink black hair and her lips are moving but I can’t make out the sound and all of it appears to be like some kind of secret promise. Because when the world hits you hard and knocks you down and it’s all you can do to get out of bed in the morning and still believe in the good and the beautiful, you find safety in company. And where his heart was jaded and broken fit perfectly with the scars and jagged edges on her own and as his strength bore into her, her strength poured into him and it was this dance, a tender game of give and take.

And she sat up and looked him in the eye and she lifted her fingers and placed them on his chest, in the very spot his heart is. And his heartbeat pounded against her hand and in these life giving beats she was reminded of how beautiful life is and of the fragility and tenderness of being tragically human and how sometimes all it takes to believe in yourself is having another person believe in you.

Like two children in a storm they huddled together, creating their own force of nature, their own shelter from the incoming hurricane. With broken pieces and jagged edges and the jaded fragments of themselves that didn’t belong, a safe harbor was built.
With his heartbeat under her fingers and his arms around her waist, she found the courage within her to calm even the deadliest sea. She found a thread called beauty and a string called hope and a piece of ribbon labeled love and she used them to stitch up whatever had been inside of her that had broken.

And I guess they had been right when they said all you need is love.


Sometimes you have moments when you lose yourself. Among piles of homework and crowded halls and the lack of sleep and the infection that is taking its toll, you become someone you didn't know you could be a few months ago. Instead of thriving you're merely surviving and life becomes a gauntlet run of sorts, an obstacle course, something just to get through.
I woke up this morning not wanting to wake up. I hit the snooze button a few too many times. My stomach was in knots as I sat in my first class, untying the knot that had been made of the apron strings.
And in these moments, when life becomes just another task to check off your to-do list, you can forget about the beauty of humanity and the beauty in the world and all that has the potential to stir something within you and make you scream "Yes! I felt that. And I am more than just a collection of cells and tissues, I am a person."
I was sitting in the library, looking at a text book I wasn't reading, when I saw them. Two people sitting a few yards away from me. And inside of me they sparked a story.
They reminded me of the most beautiful thing, something I had forgotten as I paced in the trenches and was tossed around by a life that feels like you're juggling too many plates and sooner or later something is going to come crashing down.
They reminded me of the beauty in being tragically human, in being vulnerable and being fragile. And I felt something stir inside of me, something that reminded me that I, too, am a part of this human race and within me is the potential for that kind of beauty and that kind of love.
And life is hard and exhausting but it is also beautiful, if you look.
And I want to look. I want to see people that make me stare, unable to look away, and that make me fall in love with the world all over again, that stir within me stories and feelings that remind me that yes, I am human, and yes, this is what it means to be alive.
Sometimes, in the middle of an ordinary day when life seems un-ordinarily  heavy, people come around who spark within you a fire that you can use to warm yourself and regain strength. They remind you that life is beautiful, and they make you fall so in love with the world and these people and this moment and this feeling that you can't even breathe.

So, to the couple in the library, thank you. Thank you for reminding me of the beauty that still exists, and for lighting a fire of strength and passion inside of me when I felt like I was slowly losing (myself, this battle, my hope, passion, strength and love).
Sometimes, if you open your eyes and look up, people will surprise you. There will be beauty, enough to remind you that you are human and of the reason that you do this day in and day out.
Become a beauty seeker and see love, and be love, and let it penetrate your being and then reflect it back out into the world.
Because sometimes all you really need is love.

I was asked to do a guest post for my friend Crystal's new blog with the topic "Keep Walking." It was published today, and you can check that out here