indulgences

If you've spent much time with me, you know that two of my unique passions are literature/linguistics and health food. Today, with an hour before my next volleyball practice, I am indulging in both.

An oh-so-delicious spinach/peach/banana/blueberry smoothie:


And my latest word nerd purchase (a guide to oaths, ring tones, ransom notes, famous last words, & other forms of minimalist communication):



This is my happy face
[:

meanwhile, back in the country's middle...

This summer I enjoyed the particularly intriguing taste of transition to adulthood. I got my own job, paid my own rent, planned a few camping trips on the weekends, and kept myself alive and healthy. Of course, I was far from being completely independent, but it was a big step. I worked 44-60 hours a week at two separate jobs, and spent 10-12 hours each week at the track or in the weight room. The three summer months dragged along, slowed by a job with few qualifications but somewhat redeemed by a paycheck of a gratifying size. However, those three humid months are over at last, and my last few days have been a sweaty blizzard of college tasks.

I learned, this past weekend, that moving two blocks away is just as much work as moving two states away. Fortunately, I have a man with a strong back, a reliable car, and an enduring servant's heart, so the moving process only took about three hours. However, between RA retreats, seminars, and obligations, it took me three days to unpack and settle into my new apartment. I've not quite completed the finishing touches, but today I unpacked the last box, tidied, and managed to make my living space a bit more habitable. My previously bare walls now have the beginnings of a wardrobe. In one corner, above my desk, are some refreshing cutouts from a magazine about the Pacific Northwest:


On the wall above my bed is a photo collage of the people and places dearest to my heart:


And on the doors of every apartment on my floor are my afternoon and evening's work--name labels in tasteful hippie designs (complete with hemp bows!):




As the fall athletes move in tomorrow morning, as three-a-day volleyball practices kick off with the ferocious timed mile, as new students arrive and are ushered through orientation, and as my last year of undergrad classes begin, I fall back into my familiar student's routine. I take comfort in the fact that I'm not graduating yet, and I won't be rushed into full adult responsibilities until spring. Not yet, mom. Nine more months before I really do need to be an adult. Nine more months...

i can't say i'm not biased, but...

"Date a girl who reads, who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve. She will always have an unread book in her bag. She’s the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, sniffing the pages of an old book in a second hand book shop. That’s the reader, [who] can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow.

"Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas and for anniversaries. Give her the gift of words, in poetry, in song. Let her know that you understand that words are love.

"Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but by god, she’s going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book.

"[A girl who reads understands that] behind words are other things: motivation, value, nuance, dialogue. [Miscommunication] will not be the end of the world. A girl who reads knows that failure always leads up to the climax. All things will come to [an] end. That you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two. Why be frightened of everything that you are not? Girls who read understand that people, like characters, develop.

"If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are.

"You will propose on a hot air balloon. Or during a rock concert. Or very casually next time she’s sick.

"You will smile so hard you will wonder why your heart hasn’t burst and bled out all over your chest yet. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names and even stranger tastes. She will introduce your children to the Cat in the Hat and Aslan, maybe in the same day. You will walk the winters of your old age together and she will recite Keats under her breath while you shake the snow off your boots.

"Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads.

"Or better yet, date a girl who writes."

-Rosemarie Urquico

until i have deeper thoughts, a story:

This morning I woke up after three days of illness and constant class-skipping and sleeping. The sun was shining, I felt remarkably healthy, and I had an email from my professor cancelling my 9:00 class. My morning began so well, and made me smile all day long.

HOWEVER, as I sprinkled cinnamon on my oatmeal this morning, the perforated sprinkle-lid sneakily clamped itself to the inside of the screw-on lid. As I shook cinnamon onto my breakfast, I looked out the window at the gorgeous morning and inadvertently flooded my oatmeal with about half a gallon of cinnamon. After some diligent work with a plastic bag and a spoon, my oatmeal was revived to the point of being barely palatable.

These good mornings... they definitely keep you on your toes.

Speaking of toes, I just painted mine after their long winter nudity--spring approaches! I know because I wore shorts outside after an outdoor practice (though my criminally white legs slightly dampened the mood). Here's to a high near 70 tomorrow, to healthy bodies and sunshine, and to the plastic bag of renegade cinnamon that will flavor my oatmeal tomorrow morning.

contagious delight

I firmly believe that God has graced me with a gift of delight. So many things catch my eye, thrill my soul, and make me smile! I realized today how much I want to spread that joy to others, to splash a little sunlight into the worlds of those around me. Because I believe that the world, though badly broken, is still beautiful, and that even the darkest parts are softened by the healing light of Christ.

One of my friends shared this quote from a textbook she is reading for young adult literature, and it tugged at me. Perhaps egotistically, but desperately nonetheless, I want this sentiment to be true of me.

"She was bendable light: she shone around every corner of my day.

She taught me to revel. She taught me to wonder. She taught me to laugh. My sense of humor had always measured up to everyone else's; but timid, introverted me, I showed it sparingly: I was a smiler. In her presence I threw back my head and laughed out loud for the first time in my life.

She saw things. I had not known there was so much to see...."

-Jerry Spinelli, Stargirl

when love means four envelopes

One of the most profound pieces of practical advice I have ever received: continually pray for opportunities to serve. When you are in your car driving to an event--take that drive time to pray for open eyes and a willing heart. When you are preparing for something--making food, applying makeup, walking to class, whatever--take that time of preparation and pray for an opportunity to demonstrate the love of Christ through service to those who will be around you.

I heard that advice when I was in seventh grade, and I have inconsistently practiced it ever since. I continue to be astonished by the wildly varying answers that God gives. Last week, someone needed help brushing the snow off their car. Last weekend my roommate needed a listening ear to accompany her on a stress-relieving walk throughout town. Yesterday a friend needed some neosporin. Last night I answered a knock on my door to find an enthused baker in need of a muffin tin. This afternoon I talked a friend through a romantic quandary. This evening I received a bizarre text, asking if I had four business-size envelopes. I delivered them with a smile. Tonight I sat down to hot drinks with someone who had just nervously agreed to a first date. I sagely presented the possibility of escape through the restaurant's bathroom window.

The moral of all these little stories? Moral #1: Be an RA. Lots of people will ask you for lots of things. Moral #2: Let God take you on an adventure of service--pray daily for chances to help those around you at their felt need.

priestly poets, poetic priests

"I don't deny that there should be priests to remind men that they will one day die. I only say that at certain strange epochs it is necessary to have another kind of priests, called poets, actually to remind men that they are not dead yet."
-G.K. Chesterton, Manalive

Now go and read some good poetry;
be thrilled with the joy of being thoroughly alive! :]

excuse me, i have my rights

Yesterday I was having such a grumpy day. Off-season workouts had just begun, and I legitimately had not been that sore for over two years. Every step I took yesterday, every time I tried to raise my arm, especially every time I sat down or stood up, I experienced the most excruciating pain. Conditioning was supposed to be extra long that night. Add to that the fact that I had not been getting as much sleep as I would have liked for the last few days, and you have a pretty good idea of my state of mind. And, of course, I considered several people to be unusually obnoxious, crunching ice or chewing their gum with open mouths for the entire class period. I was just grumpy.

However, while sitting in literary criticism (discussing Freudian psychology and psychoanalytic literary theory... bleh), I had a bit of a revelation. Who am I to claim all these things from life? I mean, how do I think that it is my right to have a body that is not sore, or to get a full eight hours of sleep a night? I realized how blessed I was to have a body that functioned to the capacity that I could work out and be sore. I recalled this quote by C.S. Lewis:

"Men are not angered by mere misfortune but by misfortune conceived as injury. And the sense of injury depends on the feeling that a legitimate claim has been denied. The more claims on life, therefore, that [a man] can be induced to make, the more often he will feel injured and, as a result, ill-tempered."

I just recently told someone about how firmly I believed in curing flaws NOT by focusing on the unwanted vice, but on the desired virtue. I had resolved to curb my tendency to complain, but my focus was still on not complaining, rather than on being positively thankful. Next on my agenda: realizing that I really have few claims on life that I should expect as basic rights. Being well-rested and free from pain are not basic rights, they are blessings. I want to see life in a consistently grateful way.

you are what you eat.

At church on Sunday, I was thinking about the Lord's Supper, and I was struck by a new thought:

As Christians, we are physically nourished, corporeally fed by the symbol of Christ's redeeming grace. The phrase that came to my mind was a simple one. As Christians, we are sustained by sacrifice. We wouldn't have spiritual life without Christ's sacrifice--we are spiritually fed by his death on the cross. In a small measure, through the symbol of communion, we are also physically fed by Christ's sacrifice.

What does that mean practically--that we are sustained by sacrifice (both physically and spiritually)? It means that we should be primarily fed by Christ's sacrifice on the cross, but that we should also live in such a way that we languish without consistent sacrifices of our own, sacrifices for other people among whom God has placed us.

I want to continually challenge myself to live a life of servant-like self-sacrifice and to cultivate an appetite for wholehearted unselfishness. Or perhaps, rather than focusing on "unselfishness," I should aim for the rather old-fashioned "charity." As Lewis remarks in his Screwtape Letters, the focus shouldn't be on my unselfishness in foregoing certain benefits, but in surrendering benefits so that others may be happy in having them. My focus should be not on the bigness of my own self-denial, but in the simple joy of providing blessings to others.

My (admittedly very small) first step? I have a piece of a friend's favorite candy in my pocket. Tomorrow he will have a pleasant mid-day surprise.

Thus starts my mission to embody a willing and joyful charity.

a poetic whim

I came across this poem in the preface to my edition of The Great Gatsby (a fantastic novel that I enjoyed, if you're looking for some tragic and richly descriptive social satire. But my opinion of Gatsby is entirely beside the point. The jaunty and oddly fascinating little poem is what I really mean to share).

Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her;
If you can bounce high, bounce for her too,
Till she cry "Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover,
I must have you!"
-Thomas Parke D'Invilliers

flabby sin and flabby virtue

C.S. Lewis' Screwtape, devil and tempter, on the modern pandemic of milquetoast sin:

"Then there was the lukewarm Casserole of Adulterers. Could you find in it any trace of a fully inflamed, defiant, rebellious, insatiable lust? I couldn't. They all tasted to me like undersexed morons who had blundered or trickled into the wrong beds in automatic response to sexy advertisements, or to make themselves feel modern and emancipated, or to reassure themselves about their virility or their 'normalcy,' or even because they had nothing else to do.

"The difficulty lay in their very smallness and flabbiness--how should a jelly not conform? Here were vermin so muddled in mind, so passively responsive to environment, that it was very hard to raise them to that level of clarity and deliberateness at which mortal sin becomes possible.

"The quality may be wretched; but we never had souls (of a sort) in more abundance."

I hope this inspires you, not to avoid sexual immorality (though you undoubtedly should), but to be bold, wise, and deliberate about your actions. Know what virtue is! Meditate on it and seek it in every area of your life! I hope you are sure enough of who you are (and Whose you are) that you are never misled by the world into halfhearted sin.

blessings and bodies

This semester I read a poem by Andrew Marvell called "A Dialogue Between the Soul and the Body." In this poem, the soul complains,

"O who shall, from this dungeon, raise
A soul enslaved so many ways?
With bolts of bones, that fettered stands
In feet, and manacled in hands;
Here blinded with an eye, and there
Deaf with the drumming of an ear;
A soul hung up, as it were, in chains
Of nerves, and arteries, and veins;
Tortured, besides each other part,
In a vain head, and double heart."

Recently I read a similar poem by C. S. Lewis entitled "The Magician and the Dryad," the dryad is given a body through the magician's art. Far from rejoicing, she laments this incarnation, crying,

"Oh till now she drank
With thirst of myriad mouths the bursting cataracts of the sun,
The drizzle of gentler stars, an indivisible small rain.
Wading the dark earth, made of earth and light, cradled in air,
All that she was, she was all over. now the mask you call
A Face has blotted out the ambient hemisphere's embrace;
Her light is screwed into twin nodules of tormenting sight;
Searing divisions tear her into five. She cannot hear
But only see, the moon; earth has no taste; she cannot breathe
At every branch vibrations of the sky. For a dome of severance,
A helmet, a dark, rigid box of bone, has overwhelmed
Her hair... that was her lungs... that was her nerves... that kissed the air.
Crushed in a brain, her thought that circled coolly in every vein
Turns into poison, thickens like a man's, ferments and burns.
She was at peace when she was in her unity. Oh now release
And let her out into the seamless world, make her forget."

Have you ever considered your physical body to be, not an expression of your soul, but a restriction of your soul? I hadn't, until this year, and now I sometimes long for, in the words of N. D. Wilson, "eyes hard enough to pierce the cherubim games, for unbursting ears to hear the planets sing." But perhaps, perhaps, in the words of C. S. Lewis' "On Being Human,"

"I know the senses' witchery
Guards us, like air, from heavens too big to see;
Imminent death to man that barb'd sublimity
And dazzling edge of beauty unsheathed would be."

Meanwhile, I am thrilled with the beauty and joy God does allow us to experience. Lewis continues,

"Yet here, within this tiny, charm'd interior,
This parlour of the brain, their Maker shares
With living men some secrets in a privacy
Forever ours...
The lavish pinks, the field new-mown, the ravishing
Sea-smells, the wood-fire smoke that whispers Rest.
The hill-born, early spring, the dark cold bilberries
The ripe peach from the southern wall still hot,
Full-bellied tankards foamy-topped, the delicate
Half-lyric lamb, a new loaf's billowy curves
Porridge, the tingling taste of oranges..."

Yep, I'm pretty thrilled with the blessings I have, and I'll always be curious--could there be more?