A merry little Christmas (tree)

Why, oh why

Somewhere over the rainbow
Way up high,
There's a land that I've heard of
Once in a lullaby.

Somewhere over the rainbow
The bluebirds fly so high
Birds fly over the rainbow
Why then oh why can't I

Someday I'll wish upon a star
And wake up where the clouds are far
Behind me.
Where troubles melt like lemon drops
Away above the chimney tops
That's where you'll find me.

Somewhere over the rainbow
The Bluebirds fly.
Birds fly over the rainbow
Why then oh why can't I
Why then oh why can't I

(Harold Arlen and EY Harburg)

Thanksgiving

Here again

Raining In Baltimore

This song has been in my head for a long time.

Raining In Baltimore

This circus is falling down on its knees
The big top is crumbling down
It's raining in Baltimore, fifty miles east
Where you should be, no one,s around

I need a phone call
I need a raincoat
I need a big love
I need a phone call

These train conversations are passing me by
And I don't have nothing to say
You get what you pay for
But I just had no intention of living this way

I need a phone call
I need a plane ride
I need a sunburn
I need a raincoat

And I get no answers
And I don't get no change
It's raining in Baltimore, baby
But everything else is the same

There's things I remember, and things I forget
I miss you, I guess that I should
Three thousand five hundred miles away
But what would you change if you could?

I need a phone call
Maybe I should buy a new car
I can always hear a freight train if I listen real hard
And I wish it was a small world
Because I'm lonely for the big towns
I'd like to hear a little guitar
I think its time to put the top down

I need a phone call
I need a raincoat

contradiction

is it strange that i'm so happy for everyone else that it's making me lonely?

Last Day of Freedom

Summer

Add To The Beauty

Yes, I stole the title. But I like it.

Two nights ago I rode in a van full of friends, speakers blaring Modest Mouse, up to the top of a hill and stopped. We all piled out into the summer night that felt like it should be cold but was only pleasantly chilly, and we stood and sat and lay in the road and looked at the sky spread out above and around us. There was a meteor shower that night, which was lovely, but even more lovely than that was the quiet stillness and darkness of the night, the brightness of the stars, the closeness of friends, and the warm smell of cigar smoke in the air.

We looked at the pictures drawn across the sky by the clouds, and pointed out old friends like Cassiopea and the Big Dipper. We laughed and tickled each other, and we also sat still. We craned our necks backwards until we could see the curve of the sky around the earth.

There are few moments as beautiful as that one.

Nothing and Everything

I feel like I should write something, since I haven't posted in such a long time. The trouble is, I don't know what to say. Writing is the same for me as reading or art or biking or playing the piano, or almost anything else that I love to do, in that the more I do it the more I have to do it, but if I take a break for a while it's really hard to get back into.

I saw pictures of my babies in India a few nights ago. They're all really big now, and the ones that were the littlest while I was there are losing all their front teeth, and have made the transition from "little kid" to just "kid". It was strange to see. I know it's been almost two years since I've seen them, but I forgot that kids grow a lot in two years.

I also watched a video of Prem, one of the older boys at the orphanage and also one of the sweetest kids you will ever meet, singing a hymn. His distinctly Indian voice and his thick accent chnaged the sound of the familiar hymn a little bit, but almost from the first word I knew the song, and while I listened to Prem sing the beauty of it all overwhelmed me. A sixteen-year-old boy on the other side of the world, a person whose life is completely different from mine in every possible way, was singing one of my favorite hymns, proclaiming the goodness and faithfulness of the same God that I try to follow. To me there's nothing that can compare to listening and watching as people from completely different backgrounds and ways of life sing a song that is familiar and dear to my American, Evangelical self.

But even more beautiful was the assurance that the boy singing has not forgotten the God who loves him. "[God's] word does not return void", and in Prem it has found good soil in which it is growing strong. Even though I can't be there to see it, at least I know it. That might be enough.

Amy Hit The Atmosphere

One of my favorite Counting Crows song has a line that says,

"There has to be a change, I'm sure. Today was just a day fading into another, and that can't be what a life is for."

Lately all of my todays have been fading into yesterdays, into a long, blurred line of days and weeks, and I don't like it. The past week has seemed incredibly long, and yet when I try to think back about each individual day I find that I can't separate one from all the others.

I watched a movie not long ago about Dorothy Day, and after I cried my way through it I was left with a gnawing, insatiable hunger to do something, almost anything, besides what I'm doing now. Because when I look at what I'm doing, I don't really like what I see. I'm living at home with my family, enrolled in community college, working a couple of jobs just to fill up the tank of my car, hanging out with old friends and going to my old church, just as if the last two years had never happened.

I live in the past so often. I think back to India and the kids I love there, Kuala Lumpur and the friends I made, Thailand, Phimpa, and the staff at The Well, and I wish I were any of those places instead of an old, colonial house in a little New Hampshire town. I watch other people leave for amazing trips all around the world, and I stay home and don't do anything. It seems that everyone I know is moving into an active community, traveling the world, going on excellent adventures, feeding the poor, and loving the unlovable, and I am not.

And that just "can't be what a life is for". At least not my life.

But what if it is? What if what God wants from me is what seems the hardest right now, to live contentedly at home without much direction and just do what he's put in front of me here? Even that sounds good, but in practice it's much harder. It's hard to live in the present moment when I don't feel like Dorothy Day or Mother Teresa. It's hard to remember to appreciate the beauty that God has added to my life, and love the people around me day in and day out. It's hard to admit that two years out of high school I still don't know what I'm doing in life. It's hard to watch my friends get engaged left and right without a guy in sight for me. It's hard to get up in the morning and start another day in a house full of unpacked boxes and disassembled furniture. It's hard to go to work when I'm just counting the hours until I leave again.

It's hard to watch everyone else doing large and beautiful things with their lives when I'm still trying to figure out the next step.

And I wondered the other day as I complained to Jesus about all of this if my life would have turned out differently if I had expected something different. I have never known where I was going in life, never had a boyfriend, never wanted a 9 to 5 job and the American dream. I admired the women I knew that were single and living completely on faith. I expected to go to college without a major,and I'm still doing that. I expected to transfer from one school to another, and sure enough I've done that, and I'll do it again next year. I expect to see at least two of my siblings married before I am, and my younger brother has a serious girlfriend while I am still single. Did I bring this on myself? It seems like I live just looking for the moment when I screw things up irreversibly.

"There has to be a change, I'm sure. Today was just a day fading into another, and that can't be what a life is for."

"If we do not have peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other." Mother Teresa said that, and I absolutely love it. If I do not have peace, perhaps it's because I have forgotten that my life is not just mine to do with what seems best right now. My life belongs to the people around me just as much as it does to me. It is in loving other people, belonging to them, and letting them stake a claim to me that I will find Jesus, and that is really what I want in life. Underneath all the longing for change and adventure is a deep desire to see him made real in my life. I suppose that if he wants to do that here instead of somewhere else, the only thing to do is trust that he knows best.

Not-so-happily-ever after

It feels like I have been waiting forever to hear a guy say the things that someone has said to me in the past week. But it's not what I expected at all...

It's strange. Uncomfortable. A conversation full of awkward pauses because I don't know what the hell to say and he has a lot that he would say if he wasn't such a nice guy. That weird tension between wanting to know what he's thinking and wanting to avoid this topic for the rest of my life.

I always thought that when a someone finally did confess his love for me, we would get married and live happily ever after. I didn't really expect to have to tell him that the answer is no, and that it will continue to be no for the forseeable future. Saying that is not as romantic as it sounds. It actually really sucks. Even though I know it's the right thing to do.

It's exciting in a way. It's exciting to know that there's someone out there that thinks I'm beautiful and wants to be with me. Knowing that is nice, I suppose, but it kind of makes me squirm. Every time I see him, there's a little bit of discomfort in knowing what he really thinks about me.

I know that before any of this happened, I would have envied any girl who could say what I've just said, and I wouldn't believe that she really didn't enjoy the situation.

But I really don't.

Five Senses Of Summer

My roommate tagged me, and I was going to do one of those cool things where the words "my roommate" are actually a link to her blog, but I can't figure out how to do that, so I'll just tell you that you can find her blog at http://thehollyandtheivy.blogspot.com/

Here goes...List the things you love about summer for each of the five senses.

Taste:
Fresh blueberries from my backyard, Earl Grey Tea at my house and everyone else's, rain on my tongue, Moose Tracks ice cream

Touch:
Cold water swimming on my skin, breeze coming through my car windows while I drive, hugs from dirty, sweaty little kids, smooth scarves, flip-flops flopping on my feet, walking barefoot in dirt and mud, rain falling softly

Sight:
Mist covering the mountains, forests of trees, the stars at night, bright gardens, the ripples of raindrops falling in a pond

Smell:
The lovely, alive smell of the outdoors, Earl Grey tea, patchoili oil, my favorite hippie clothes store, my friend's hugs (I know that sounds strange, but she has a particular smell...), my mom's ginger and vegetable stir-fry dishes, paint

Sound:
The brook rushing behind my house, falling rain, crickets and peepers, loud music in my car with the windows down, my brother playing the guitar, conversation rumbling through the house

Them

My family moved back to the Upper Valley tonight.

I saw them all a week ago, and so they weren’t new as they climbed off the bus, a family of only six right now instead of nine. I forgot that the friends waiting for them with me hadn’t seen them for almost a year.

It was strange, waiting at the bus station to pick up my family, piling them and all their luggage into our cars, and driving them to dinner and then to a hotel. It was equally weird leaving them at the hotel and driving back to what has become my house. I was a little disconcerted, while I washed the dishes at home, to think that in about another week I will be moving back in with my family and giving up the freedom of only taking care of myself that I’ve grown so used to, and to find that I was a little apprehensive about that.

What was strangest of all, though, was thinking of my family as “them” instead of “us”.

Their collective experiences this past year are very different than my individual ones, and because of that for the first time I feel a little like an outsider. They don’t know how I spend my days, or who the people I talk with my friends about are. They weren’t the ones I told when my car refused to start again last night. But neither do I know their friends, or their daily routines, or what happened to them yesterday. Strangest of all, I don’t get their jokes anymore. For the first time in my life, when my sisters look at each other, say something in unison, and then laugh uproariously, I don’t understand.

I don’t know what to think about that.

Chester

My car's name is Chester. My little brother would jump down my throat if he knew my car had a name, but I wasn't the one that named him. Chester got his name from my not-as-little brother and his girlfriend, and I inherited Chester and his name when that brother went gallavanting off to Europe. (In case you're wondering, I'm not speaking to him anymore.) Chester is a dark blue Toyota Camry who is the same age as my 16 year old brother, and he has the distinction of being my first car, so I am extremely attached to him.

Unfortunately, Chester has become tempermental in his old age. Yesterday was the fourth time that he has simply refused to start, which is not only inconvenient, but gives me that lost, panicky feeling that I get when I miss an exit on the highway or spend too much time alone in the house without seeing another person. Chester's new tendency not to start is not improving our relationship.

I was talking with a friend last night about her car, which I borrowed until Chester decided to work again, and in between showing me where the lights and the windshield wipers were she said, "Don't worry if it rattles. I don't know why it does that, but I just ignore it." I said ok, and we moved on to which side the gas tank is on, but after a minute or two we realized how stupid our optimistic attitudes toward car trouble are. Why do I think it's ok to just ignore the rattling sound, or the check engine light, or the lack of oil in the car? My general response to these things is just a vague idea that it will all "work out" somehow.

Then, of course, Chester refuses to start some day and I actualy have to face the fact that he's not just going to magically repair himself.

The funny part about all this is that I treat other things the same way that I treat mysterious rattling noises. My silly notion that somehow everything will just be ok gets applied to relationships and plans too. It's so easy to just ignore the little warning signals that I don't really understand until suddenly something goes completely wrong and refuses to work anymore.

The big problem in all of this is that I really hate taking responsibility for anything. I never feel capable enough to deal with things, and so I write them off as not being my problem, or just assume that someone else will take care of them and they will all be ok eventually. But something that Mother Teresa said has started to become very real to me lately. She said, "If we do not have peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other".

If we really belong to each other, then everyone's problems are my problems, and my problems are everyone else's problems. I'm not sure I always like this, but I think it's what Jesus has called me to. He has called me give up my life in the sense that I can put my plans or my wants aside and deal with the problems that arise in other people's lives instead of just ignoring them. This is messy, and usually involves areas that I don't understand any more that I understand car mechanics and what to do when Chester refuses to start. But if I want things to work out, I need to actually do something, like consult a mechanic, and not just blindly hope that everything will be ok. Often it won't, at least not for a long time, and not until I have invested more time or money or discomfort than I ever would have wanted to.

Yet there's beauty in that. There's incredible beauty in the thought that we are all capable of pouring ourselves into each other's lives, and being so connected that we really do belong to each other. Wouldn't it be wonderful to have people in your life who listen to the little rattling sounds and not just the silence of an engine that won't start? That's what I want in my life.

I have invested a lot of money, time, worry, and tears into Chester in the last few weeks, and right now he's working again. I don't know how long it will last, but I think it's worth it.

Why my blogs never last

I'm going to try blogging again.

I don't really know why. This is at least my fourth attempt at a blog, and each previous attempt has ended miserably. I actually wrote a few good posts for a blog I started this past fall, but inevitably I begin to despise my blogging efforts, and I give up and delete everything. Sometimes I don't even get as far as the first post. Probably fifty percent of the time.

My biggest problem with blogging is that I like to sound clever. After posting anything, I spend several days re-reading what I've written and changing things. Now, there's nothing wrong with that, but it tends to consume all my time, either because I'm so proud of what appears at the time to be an exceptionally brilliant post, or because I want to say something of substance but can't seem to actually find anything to say.

Another problem is that I get sentimental and post long strings of photographs that don't mean a thing to anyone but me.

I also have a habit of trying to incorporate favorite lines from songs into my posts, but usually they don't have to do with anything that I might actually say, and this is annoying. I spend far too much time trying to weasel in a connection between the line from the song and my thoughts, and I don't ever get very far.

However, despite all these problems, I continually yeild to the temptation of blogging, or at least creating my own space, full of my own thoughts, out in the
open for anyone to stumble upon (and hopefully be impressed by my cleverness).

Yet another friend of mine started blogging though, and here I am. My friends are excellent bloggers. My mother is a fantastic one. Surely, surely, so am I, I always think as I dig through my brain for another clever line from a song to serve as my username for yet another blog. Certainly, at least, I could learn to blog well with practice.

So here I go again. Perhaps the next time you come to read my not-as-clever-as-I-might-have-hoped thoughts, you will find that I have deleted this blog in frustracion, like its predecessors. But perhaps you will find that it's still here. Perhaps I really can learn with practice. I hope so.