“From now on I will tell you of new things,
    of hidden things unknown to you.
They are created now, and not long ago;
    you have not heard of them before today…

Then you will say in your heart,
    ‘Who bore me these?’…

Then you will know that I am the Lord;
    those who hope in me will not be disappointed.” –Isaiah 48:6-7;49:20-23

We dream. We’re lying in bed, my best friend and me, the way we have for years. It’s storming outside, so we have a soundtrack, but there’s no light. We stare at the ceiling, our voices rising and falling, trailing off and then sparking again to share whatever new thing has just come. We stare and stare,  content with being sure only of each other and the bed and the rain outside. And we dream. “I want to name my daughter Claire,” I say and she says that’s a good name. “I want to change the world,” she says and I assure her, with no hesitation, that she will. “I’d like to learn how to cook omelets,” I say again, and then she decides it’s time to go to sleep.

But we dream. Right now, my whole life is spun in bits of dreaming: I’d like to hang my poster of American authors above a navy couch; I’d like to fill a home with flowers and omelets; I’d like to leave goodness behind me in the world. The dreams can’t all possibly come true–we all know I should let the omelet thing rest–but some of them will. The adventure is that we wake up in the mornings and we pour cereal and we don’t know what dreams of ours we’re meeting that day. The adventure is that we wake up and we pour cereal and we don’t what brand-new hopes will be sown within us that day. The adventure is that dreaming over cereal (or at all) is hard and messy and sometimes, you want to wake up and hold your dream instead. Sometimes, you want to go ahead and sit on your navy couch, reveling in the fact that you have a couch all your own. Dreaming is exhausting, and believing is scary, and my life is spun out of dreams today.

But–but. The dreams, man, they can weigh you down, which is not exactly poetry in motion. We don’t like to stare into the wind and write, “Dreams are heavy.” Because dreaming, it should take you places. But–but maybe that’s the thing–dreaming does take you places, places you dreamt about and places you didn’t think to dream up. And here, in the going there, in the midst of a thousand competing dreams, a hundred different directions, in the middle of catching sight of something I could hold, I realized that dreaming is a privilege. “I just want some things to be the same,” I told an old friend as we sat in an old spot. Even there, the dreams of ours, they blew by in the wind between us. They lapped at our toes and fell down in the moonlight to land on our noses and made my hair dance in the breeze. His eyes shined with them, and mine did, too, but I said it again: “I just want some things to stay the same.” He shrugged a little, because he couldn’t make that happen. I knew that before I said it the first time. But dreaming, we agreed, is a privilege. It’s hard, that’s for sure. It’s terrifying–haven’t I said that here before? But it’s possible because of freedom and joy and belief that can’t be shaken. So we lie in bed and we sit under the stars and we dream. We dream like we’re the first ones to dream because it feels just like that.

A little while later, I sat on a bench in the dark. I watched the river, fighting with the bits of me that long so strongly to jump ahead. I let my heart wander to dreams it hasn’t found yet, and I let it discover them and jump around and place them within for safe keeping. I know I’ll take them along; I’ll drop some behind me as I go, and I’ll gather more, and I’ll spend my life doing this.

Still, the dreaming might never abound as much as right now, when the very air around me smells of upcoming-ness, of maybes and could bes and anything’s possibles. Maybe one day, I’ll forget how I dreamed so hard that it wore me out and revived me all at the same time; maybe I’ll be talking to a dreamer girl named Claire and I’ll have to dig through years of dreams come true to find the dreaming I did and tell her that it’s OK to think dreaming is hard, to plead in the night air, “Can’t something just stay the same?” I’ll remember this time, though, and I’ll take her hand and dare her to keep going, to keep imagining and brewing up and throwing fairy dust. I’ll remind her to pray, to pray for vision and courage and sustenance and magic. I’ll tell her about the dreaming I’ve done and the dreaming I’m doing, and I’ll tell her they happen. Dreams come true. (I already know that.)

Tonight, I told myself those same things, on a bench by my river. I glanced up and saw a boat coming my way, a boat with a green light. Dreaming, man. It’s fun.

“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—to-morrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning—” [Fitzgerald]

I nod and smile at him, because well, that’s what they all say.

And they’re all right, all those well-meaning wisdom-throwers. “Apply for everything,” they say. “Don’t take the first thing offered to you,” others suggest. “You’re really awesome,” everyone concludes, throwing out a knowing smile and another arm pat. And we’ve all still got time, graduation only a week and change behind us. My friends and I are quick to remind whoever falls victim to Meltdown of the Day that “nobody knows!” It’s easy to say when you’re holding someone’s hand, the trust in your own heart thriving; the words seem spun out of thin air when it’s you who’s given in to the waves of fear, though. But they take your hand, they look you in the eye, and they say the words that are real and true and mighty: “Me too. I understand. It’s going to be OK.” And the fear, the fear crashes on the shores of trust and rolls back out again.

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Even so, I woke up this morning with that familiar knot already lodged in the pit of my stomach. I drank some coffee and read some verses. I stared at the ceiling and waited for the Lord, who is so faithful to remind me again and again that its going to be OK. Ever patient and gentle, He takes my hand until it passes, reminding me that we’re in it together, that He’s been here before, that He knows where we’re going. This morning, though, He did not calm me with those adages. Instead, He whispered something different: “Daily bread.”

Now, I eat toast for breakfast every morning, and I thought maybe my spiritual thought waves had gotten mixed up with my digestive tract, but no, there it was–a new revelation, reverberating through my being with a clear trill: Daily bread, daily bread, daily bread. Give us this day our daily bread (Matthew 6:11). It lands on me like a feather drifting to the ground before my feet: We were not taught to pray for monthly bread, for bread come July, for tomorrow’s toast. We were taught to ask for daily bread, for get-me-through-right-now manna, for I-need-you-every-single-day sustenance. We were taught to return again and again, daily, taught to begin the morning asking for and inviting in and seeking hard and chasing fast that grace which sustains us.

Blessed be the Lord, Who bears our burdens and carries us day by day, even the God Who is our salvation! Selah [pause, and calmly think of that]! –Psalm 68:19

And after this, my morning thoughts–”Jesus is good. And I don’t have a job.”–seem to be the best ones I’ve had in a while. Because one of these days, my thoughts will be, “I have to get to work”–I believe it–and what if I lose my dependence on daily bread? What if I wasn’t learning now how to wake up and demand nutrition, learning now that I am so broken and afraid without it? What if having a job, or a husband, or a fill-in-the-blank, lessens that desire to be filled each morning anew? It seems like the place I’m in, the one where the only things I’m certain of are today’s toast and coffee for breakfast and this song on the way to work and people who are praying for me, is the place where I can taste bread daily. This revelation does more than roll the fear back; it pulls me out deeper, until I’m floating moment by moment, where the peace is as tangible as the salt in the water–not really tangible at all, but man can you taste it.

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For all the revelation, for all the peace, I head out into a world that tries to insist that the best thing is five-year-plans bread, bursting-with-success bread, exactly-what-you-dreamed-of bread. I sit down and begin again: publications jobs in Birmingham, AL; editorial jobs in Atlanta, GA; magazines in Mobile, AL; “To whom it may concern, My name is Lindsey Lowe…”

“How’s it going?” my roommate asks, and I look at her and shrug, because today is not the day. I’ll wake up again tomorrow, and I won’t know where I’m going, but I seem to be getting better at that. After all, I had my toast this morning, and I trust that it will be there tomorrow. So I send a few emails. I apply for something I’m not sure I’m qualified for, but it can’t hurt, I tell her. And then I close my computer and we go for a coffee and a walk. We go out and we get our daily bread, our today, our this-is-your-right-now sandwich. And it tastes good.

I posted a lot of photos to Instagram because I was proud. I was proud because I’m a first generation student, the first one in my family to graduate college. And I was proud because college is a hard thing, a thing that demands that you get out of bed so many times when all you really want to do is sleep (in this way, I feel that going to college is akin to having a baby. Seems like a solid theory, right?)

So I posted a lot of photos, photos popping with smiles, each one shouting, “I”M HAPPY!” And I was happy–so, so happy. But later I scrolled back through my Instagram feed, and I realized that some of the other emotions got lost in the happy, that the filters on those photos blurred the truth that they represented. HAPPY is a terrific element of photos, but I needed to remember that they showed off more, that they weren’t just snapshots of a happy moment, but of a life that has its happy and its joyful and its honestly hard and its toast-hits-the-floor-jelly-side-down moments. It’s hard to believe everyone else has those toast moments when no one Instagrams them, am I right? That’s where the words come in.

I posted a lot of photos, like this one:

I like this photo. I like it quite a bit. I like it because, for one thing, we look super happy, which we were. The joy that seems so evident is real–you can’t make that up. But we were also exhausted, which perhaps you cannot see, but I can. The day had been unimaginably long already at this point, and we’d all just done this great big thing, but we didn’t feel any different, only tired and a little bit hungry and amped up on adrenaline. We’re all sort of bumbling around, unsure of how to feel or what to do, and we find each other and hold on, looking into the cameras again and again until our cheeks burn.

We find each other because it’s what we do–we find each other because we’ve learned to do that, but the picture doesn’t tell about the process, about how we’ve fought for the relationships that look so sunshiney here. We’ve spent four years loving each other, and I can tell you those four years saw snappy comebacks and broken hearts and grumpy mornings. I can tell you that I’ve looked each of these people in the eyes and said, “I’m sorry,” and also, “I forgive you.” I can tell you that they have taught me what it’s like to have a friend and to be a friend, that when I have felt certain there was no reason for them to give me another chance, they always did. I can tell you that when they call me, I answer, and when they need me, I go, and when I see one of them coming toward me, I get excited because things are better when they’re around. It’s a photo of six tired, happy kids, holding onto one another, unsure of most things but that. It sure did get a lot of likes on Instagram (they like us, kiddos.)

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In an unromantic twist, I headed straight to the bathroom as soon as I filed out of the Coliseum. Once I finished (I set my diploma on the floor and decided to Lysol it later), I came out just in time to see my mom disappear around a corner, and my heart began to race, because it was my mom. I shouted, “Mom!” and at least 17 middle-aged women turned to see if I was theirs, but not my mom. I wondered, as I chased after her, if their daughters had ever asked if they could call them, “Mom,” or if the title ever sounded strange when it hit theirs ears. I wondered if those same daughters relished the word like it was dark chocolate, sweet and rich and the real deal. I said it again to her, but she still didn’t hear me, so instead, I touched her shoulder, and when she turned and saw me–when they all did–they came around me in the way a family does. They told me how proud they were and I believed them. We took this picture.

Later, I wondered if the chap who snapped it had any idea that we weren’t a normal family, but rather, one who had shifted and swelled and meshed with one another. I wondered if he’d noticed that I had different eyes than they did, that I had a different story, if any of that showed up on the screen. I wondered if the picture shows that the night before, we’d argued over what appetizers to order for dinner or that my mom had woken up before the sun with me or that there was a time when I believed they couldn’t ever possibly feel like my real family. I wondered if the picture said, “But they do. They are.”

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I guess, relatively speaking, that I didn’t post that many photos–maybe four or five. But it was enough for the instagram likes to drain my cell phone battery, and those made me smile–you shared in my joy, my pride, my affinity for photos that make it seem that I graduated college in 1983. And the day–the long, beautiful, perfect, exhausting day–was one to be celebrated, so I was happy to celebrate with all those people who follow my life in photos.

But I needed words. I needed to place paragraphs under these moments, paragraphs to say it’s what you think, and it’s not what you think. I needed to let sentences explain that it’s everything you see, it’s all the sunshine, and it’s more, and it’s less, because it’s shadows, too. I needed to show you these photos and ask you to celebrate them–like them, please–but also, give me a chance to explain. I needed to admit that it was a long, long day, that I came home and stared at the wall in a stupor for a good half hour because I wasn’t sure how to start wrangling my emotions. I needed to show you a picture of me with my favorite people in front of my favorite place and put into letters that I’m scared to leave them, scared because they’re the best thing. I needed to say, also, that I’m excited, excited because I will always believe the best is yet to come, in some way or another. I needed to say all of this, and I needed to show you, too, that we were happy.

It was a big day, after all. Maybe one of the biggest days of my life. Thanks for celebrating with me.

I’ll start with a confession: I never wanted to come here. I dreamt a lot of college dreams in high school, but flyers from The University of Alabama were always tossed in the trash. It seemed too cliche, first of all, and too close to home, second of all. It seemed like there would be no chance to stretch here, and so I hung my hat on places farther north and sharper west than Tuscaloosa, Ala. But through a beautifully labyrinthine set of events, I found myself pulled so strongly here that I really had no choice but to pack up my little yellow vacuum and a whole lot of excitement and arrive, bright-eyed and ready.

I can’t say I’m sorry for this; I think this beginning was important, important because I needed to know that the reason I was here was not because I’d drawn up my own plans and they’d worked, but because I had and they hadn’t. I needed to know that so that at the end, I could see that my God’s ways are just plain better than mine, and that His glory radiates from the things He touches. And He’s touched our time together, UA.

Here’s another thing that you might not have seen coming in a love letter (which this is), but I have to say: if it hadn’t been you, I still think it would have been good. I trust that no matter where I go, Jesus has beauty for me: people ready to wrap me up, sunsets painted for my delight, wildflowers that peek out along paths that learn the way my feet go slap-slap on the pavement. I believe that it’s not the place, but the people, and it’s the people because of the Jesus who cares.

But it was you. It was you, it was you, it was you. It was everything about you, from the women who have become the sort of family for which I’ve prayed to those library steps that have stood so loyal as I’ve returned again and again to lay my heart right down on them. It’s the way the trees seemed to beckon me in, the way the Chimes send waves of familiar melody throughout the air. It’s the way some of the old buildings seem to reverberate with secrets; it’s even the way the old buildings also reverberate with the smell of nacho cheese Bugles. It’s the way I feel when I get close to here, like no matter where I’ve been, I’m home now.

It comes down to this, University of Alabama: It could have been anyone, but it had to be you. So thank you, thank you for wrapping so much goodness around me for the sake of God’s glory. I want you to know that when I stand in the middle of the Quad and I feel the sunshine on the crown of my head, the gratitude is overwhelming. It laps up against all the sides of me, until it threatens to spill over onto your sidewalks, but I gather it in. Part of me wouldn’t mind leaving a piece of me right there on the concrete, but I know that’s not how it works–I will leave, and you, you will continue to change and grow and thousands of other bright-eyed kids will learn what it’s like to love and be loved on your grounds. But you changed me, or rather, you gave me a place to be changed. It was sweet Jesus who wrote grace all over my heart, but you gave me steps to sit on while I let that fall on me.

Part of me wishes I could stay, UA, but I know it wouldn’t be good for either of us. You need to keep me just as I am now, and I need to take you, just as you are, into the next adventures. I know that one day I will come back, and you will be different. I will search the faces of those kids scurrying around, wearing a look called “I have six papers due.” I’ll know that look, but I’ll feel a hundred years away from it, even though I’ve only just now washed the final bits of it from around my eyes. I may not recognize the faces or the new buildings or the way the sunlight lands on the grass now with that old tree gone, but here’s my promise: That won’t stop me from climbing those steps and handing over my heart to you again, even if just for a little while. After all, we’re old friends, aren’t we?

Here’s to you, University of Alabama. Roll Tide to all, and to all a Roll Tide.

All my love,

Lindsey, Class of 2013

P.S. Like Gertrude Stein said, “This is the place of places and and it is here.”

You called me out upon the waters / The Great Unknown, where feet may fail

I’m feeling like I’ve never felt before. For so long, the way I discover and name and conquer my feelings is to write through them; alas, when I try to approach these, I’m met with blank pages looking back. There’s a noted lack of flowing adjectives to describe these months, so I’ve been breathing deeply and trying other things. I’ve been sitting on benches in the sunshine, feeling it to my bones. I’ve been talking to a lot of people, listening to much advice, opinion, and well wishes. And I’ve been singing.

And there I find You in the mystery / In oceans deep, my faith will stand

My feelings are this, or something like this, or worlds away from this, but this is the best I can do: They are in between. I am in between, in between nostalgia and anticipation, in between college and “real life,” (though the past four years have felt very real), in between waiting and receiving. I am in between, in between sitting on a green couch with my best girls and sitting on a different couch talking on the phone to them. I am in between trust and fear, in between hope, joy, and peace, and the opposite of those things. I am in between faith spoken and faith believed.

The thing about being in between is that it requires much. Here, in this place, I feel shaky–my ground is unstable, my plans beyond grasp, my security insecure. Here is the place where my faith must dance, must prove itself as faith, and not a glass structure that shines real pretty when the sunlight hits. Here I have found that the only steady thing is faith. I have found, you see, that it is the bridge that gets me across the place in between.

You’ve never failed, and You won’t start now

These words are to say a couple of different things. They are to admit to you, and to myself, that I am afraid, that the fear here is so real that I can nearly reach out and take a chunk of it to hold in my hands. I am afraid when I think that I can count the weeks left before I graduate college on one hand. I am afraid even in the midst of normalcy, even before there’s anything been changed or anything to miss. I am afraid when I look at job after job boasting bullet points of qualifications I don’t have. I am afraid when I hear of other people’s plans that seem so shiny. I am afraid when I think of that bridge between this and what’s next, afraid it won’t be built. I am afraid when I sit on my steps at the library or on the couch with my girls that I won’t love what’s next as much as I’ve loved this. I am afraid of failing, and I am afraid that if I fail, the people I love will stop being proud of me. I am afraid I will stop being proud of me.

And I will call upon Your Name, and keep my eyes above the waves / When oceans rise, my soul will rest in Your embrace

But there is a bigger, louder part of me that is not afraid at all. This part is excited, excited to run forward into whatever is next. I am excited that I can look at a list of cities and simply pick one. I am excited to say, “I did it!”, hang my diploma on my wall, and own my own plates. I am excited to do my part of the dirty work of making all of those big dreams in my head happen, or to be a part of Jesus doing something different than I’ve ever imagined. I am excited to be a testimony of His faithfulness, a songbird of His joy, a poster child for His grace. In between the fear and excitement seems to be the place where these things show up, where His faithfulness and joy and grace flow, because it is here that we realize we do not have them. It is here that I call for help, and here that I dance.

For I am Yours, and You are mine

I have promised this place that these last days will be noticed. I don’t want to forgot to look around and drink it in because I’m too busy straining to see what’s ahead, too worried to feel the sunshine. And all this said, let me say this louder: It is beautiful. It’s a tremble-worthy process, and I tremble. It’s a sweaty adventure, and I sweat. But it’s more beautiful even so, and because of that, I can’t help but sing.

Spirit, lead me where my trust is without borders / Let me walk upon the waters, wherever you will call me

Take me deeper than my feet could ever wander, and my faith would be made strong in the presence of my Savior

of evident invisibles
exquisite the hovering…

–cummings

I tend to move quickly. I don’t mean that figuratively–everyone and their mamas know I be hanging on before I can let go–but honestly, in my day-to-day life, I go from place to place with the speed of a jackrabbit, mostly because my mother walks really, really fast and I spent all our grocery outings trying to keep up with her. I talk really fast, too, in such a way that leaves my brain in the dust. I feel quickly, my heart swallowing people and places and broken bits of nostalgia up before they know what has hit them (this is not quite as romantic or endearing as it may sound, let me promise you.) And I bang things around, in my speed to get places and say things and become emotionally attached to things. You may not think this true, if I’ve never banged you around, but it is. I have to take special care; I try my best to hold people and tacos and cats carefully, as not to dent or fracture or smudge them.

Paradoxically, though, I am fragile. I am soft, easily bruised. I get winded when I move too quickly, and I get the feeling I’ll never be in shape enough to keep up. And I have bits that notice the world, even as I’m breezing through, and so it is that I come to halt, panting, noticing. So I am caught so often, strung between telling my story and listening, between running to class and standing paralyzed by the beauty of something ordinary, between feeling so fiercely that my bones quiver and sleeping. (Sleeping is kind of my strong suit in general.) Perhaps this seems confessional to you (perhaps not if you’ve ever been banged around by me), but, you see, this is my place to run after I’ve noticed, or listened, or felt. This is where I file my remarkable things, because I do believe that they are suspended all around us, waiting to be to plucked and tucked in our pockets, moments to become ours and to mean something to us, if we let them. And I tell you so you reach out too, and take your own, and call your life beautiful, because if you want, you can see it that way. Everything I said before–the me-breaking-the-tacos part–is to let you know I don’t have a soapbox, only a longing for the joy and peace that I know is already mine. It’s only to say sometimes I have to run into a tree to look up and see it, and that what happens inside of me when the wind blows its leaves is extraordinary.

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The past couple of weeks have been long but not tedious, because I’m entering into that period of time when everything is glossed over with “But it’s almost over.” Still, my here-to-thereness is in full swing nonetheless, so I am running, stopping, smelling the roses, running, whining, counting the clouds, reading, running, sleeping. Maybe you are too. Here are my standstill moments; may you find yours, too.

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It’s a busy day at the office, so much so that my feet are sweating from all of the back-and-forth I was doing. I spend an hour lifting boxes of magazines up and down, causing wisps of hair to escape from my bobby pins and my fingers to turn red. I slide the pages into envelope after envelope, fasten the clasp, pull packing tape across the top, and drop it into a pile. Slide, fasten, stick, drop. Over and over and over. Perhaps I was a little lonesome, but only because mailing day is like watching your baby graduate kindergarten, and I was doing it alone. But then, in the middle of the process–slide, fasten, sti–a magazine fell off the table and open to the page of my story. There is my name, read most probably by my mother, but it marks the work that had kept me up at night, caused me to bite my nails to the quick, pushed me to eat 37 Hershey kisses too many. The page, there, just a page with a name; the name, there, belonging to me; the me, there in my office, but also 15 years old with a dream, and all the dreaming really looks like biting your fingernails to the quick and rewriting and picking another word and earning your name, in 12-point font, on a page, and no one told me that. But there, my name on the page, feeling better than I’d ever dreamt. I stop to touch it, to whisper to dreamers everywhere that dreaming is hard and that I’m dreaming still, let’s dream together, and then: slide, fasten, stick, drop.

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I am sitting on the floor of my living room, 6:17 p.m. sunshine warming patches, a March evening wind teasing spring. My head is full to the brim with gotta-dos, but I’m just breathing, letting the quiet do a number on my head. I almost start to write, but I decide instead to Google (again) “jobs in publications” and so I scroll through the listings (again), my eyes looking for something that sounds like me, or could sound like me. I have no intention of applying yet, but I just want to see, to calm the anxious voices in my head. Before I know it, I’m writing a cover letter, putting a final bullet point on my resume, sending an email that ends with, “Thank you for your time and consideration.” I know my email lands among dozens of others, but this is the first time I’ve tried, the first time I’ve said, “Pick me, please.” It’s the first time I’ve really reached out past May to that future of mine and said, “Let’s do this.” The quiet stands still, noticing me not; the wind blows without knowing that I’ve just acknowledged June and July and the rest of my life with a smile. It settles on me first, but then it flits away, and I know the worry, the anxiety, isn’t coming back. So I make some toast.

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I stop by her office to say hello, and she invites me to sit down, and like I’ve done so many times before, I pull a chair up and tell her about the bullet points of my life. She knows all the bold ones already, so we talk about how I sometimes feel caught between being a rational being and seeing life aesthetically; about how the sunshine fell on someone and it made me love him, maybe just for second, or maybe for the rest of my life; about how in the summers I nap in the Alabama sun and wake up with puddles of my sweat pooling around me, happy as a clam. “Some people think that’s weird,” I say, shrugging, and she smiles and says, “You are weird,” and I think about how this woman didn’t know me two years ago, but now she does. I think about she picked me to write for the thing she pours her heart into, and now she pours her heart into me, and I tell her she’s my friend, and despite how different we are, we are friends. I want to tell her I have very few friends whom I trust as wholeheartedly as I trust her, but instead we talk about something in the paper and then I leave.

On my way to my car, I think about how I’d like some tacos, but I come home and have a salad.

So let’s talk more about love, about dirty, messy love (and I mean that in the cleanest way possible.)

More about love, that which wraps us up in light, more light than we’ve ever seen; that which breaks our hearts, and I don’t mean in the sad way, but in the way that happens when you must allow your insides to shatter and be put back together by a love that is bigger than you can stand. I do not mean that to say that I am in love, except that I do–I am in love and it is in me.

I’m telling you this because I had an epiphany, and I have a feeling I’ve experienced this revelation before, but you know–sometimes it takes more than once. Though the sun rises every morning, we sometimes forget it is there after two weeks of rain, and it must win our trust back again; and so it goes: we must be taught again and again. So more about love, and it is this: It is so big; it is big, and it can be messy.

It is messy, I think, because it is so all-consuming. Because I love you, but I love me, too. Because I want to love more when I love less, and vice versa. Because I love things that don’t love me back, like the trees, but somehow, that fills me up, too. Because I love and I love and I love and we love, and we cannot stop, even when goodbyes loom, even when goodbyes mean hellos to dreams come true. Because despite all my darkness, I am called lovely–I am loved. So I love, too, in deep, full, unkempt ways.

I’m sorry if you thought this was a romance story, but then again, I guess it is. It’s a love story about the people with whom I’ve shared the past four years, those who are making plans like me, paths that are different than mine. It’s a love story about the sidewalks I’ve been strutting down for some time now, those which will seem the same and different just months from tonight. It’s a love story about the adventure I’ve had, which was so much; it’s a love story about the one I’m about to begin, which I’m sure will be deep, full, and unkempt. It’s about looking around and seeing it, about being unsure how to love it any more than I do, and yet feeling the need to cram more inside to take with me. And this love I have for these people and places and this sky, it’s not that pink stuff that flits around on the Hallmark card aisle, though don’t get me wrong–I love that stuff. No, this is the sort of stuff that gets deep in your bones, that becomes part of your breathing and eating and laughing and snorting. It’s the kind of stuff you feel so strongly that you ache within in all the best ways, the kind that makes you want to stand still for just a few minutes so that you can drink it in more, but it’s too much.

And it’s just enough.

“We love the things we love for what they are.”

–Robert Frost

I graduate in a month and some change. Over the next few weeks, I’d like to write some posts about how this place and its people–mostly its people–have impacted me. Spoiler alert: I love this place. I really love its people. This blog has most always been a space to document what it’s like to love it here, even when loving it required me to get my hands dirty. I hope you’ll join me as I walk through saying goodbye, and as I step into the next adventure.

I look; morning to night I am never done with looking.
Looking, I mean not just standing around, but standing around as though with your arms open.

–Mary Oliver

Aren’t you busy?

Isn’t that what we say, when they ask you how you are? “Good! Busy, but good.” And oh, it’s true. I am busy. That word, when I say it so many times, begins to sound a certain way–bitter on my tongue. Busy, busy, busy. Too much. Busy. Can’t do that. Busy. Tired. Things to do/to-do list. Busy, busy. And because I am busy, busy in a way that makes people laugh when I admit I must schedule them in my planner or they’re not “official.” I am busy in a way that causes the barista to raise his eyebrow at me when I order my third cappuccino of the day. I am busy in the way that some of you must be, the way that pulls you from commitment to class to work, in this fashion that strings you along until your breath is but shallow panting in an effort to keep up. I am busy in ways that demand so many hours that I feel guilty if I waste precious ones people-watching in a corner of the coffee shop–or at least I feel guilty for a bit until I remember that people-watching is a rather good way to spend time. And because when I tell people I’m busy they always respond, “Oh, I know what you mean!”, I’m assuming you do know what I mean. I’m assuming you’re busy, too.

I was on the phone with my best friend earlier this week, and at the same time paging through my planner. “I think next week is going to be busy,” I said, breathing deeply at the mere idea of the tasks that would summon my efforts. “That’s okay,” she said. And I stopped to think–to look around the coffee shop–and I realized she was right. I just have to pause and see at my busy.

My busy is mine, see. My busy isn’t your busy–it’s special busy, busy picked out for me, busy only I can do. If I kneel down and examine my busy between my fingers, I can see it. Hanging on between the b and the u is a group of girls who meet to sing to Jesus, who expect to me show up, sure, but who I know would forgive me if I didn’t. In the middle of my busy is a magazine that I helped stitch together with my words, yes, but also with 2 a.m. emails and listening to that song over and over and a red pen and a swelling of pride. My busy calls me to walk out of a classroom with goosebumps from expanding my brain. And when I step into the warmth, with all of those brilliant words I’ve consumed already becoming a part of me, I turn to my comrade and mention the spangles of sun cast through a checkerwork of leaves: “Isn’t the world a beauty?”

I’ve been busy, sure, and I’ve been busy in the ways that leave you with dark circles under your eyes, the kind of running that leads to last-minute everything and oops-I-forgot-that panic, and a sigh and a knowing shrug when someone asks, “How are you?” I’ve been busy, like you have been, sometimes so busy that I do not notice the spangles of sun, the dancing coins themselves, that are mentioned in the heavy book I’ve been carrying around all day. Sometimes I am so busy that I climb on the bus for a reprieve and find myself riding in circles, missing stops, and panicking at the thought of missing my moments of busy.

The busy is busy, it’s demanding and jagged and sometimes stressful, like all good busy is at times. But the busy shines, or at least it does if you look at it in the right light. And let me encourage you to hold your busy up in the sun and watch it reflect Glory–may you allow yourself to get steeped in the heat of busy, and see that your busy is handing you your moments, the ones that are only for here and only for now, the ones we turn to look for when the busy calms.

So I have been busy: I have risen with the sun to share my coffee with James Joyce. I have found myself zipping across campus, as fast as I could zip, to fall, three minutes late and sweating, into a desk, my teacher literally talking to me in a language I can’t understand quite yet. I have cried on the bus because I missed my stop and I was late and I had work to do. Busy. But then: Busy: a cluster of girls laughing; a late-night trip for doughnuts and milk and dancing; a baby clutching my neck. Dozens of things to do, lists to finish and more to make, a life to be lived; a chance to breathe through the busy and notice the dancing coins.

Look and see them for yourself, Reader. They are there–they are everywhere.

So come to the pond,
or the river of your imagination,
or the harbor of your longing,
and put your lips to the world.

And live
your life.

–MO

Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy-laden and overburdened, and I will cause you to rest. [I will ease and relieve and refresh your souls.]

Take My yoke upon you and learn of Me, for I am gentle (meek) and humble (lowly) in heart, and you will find rest (relief and ease and refreshment and recreation and blessed quiet) for your souls. –Matthew 11:28-29

“Come to me.”

I’ve been hearing those words a lot lately, in a variety of different ways: A blog post, a song, in a verse I’ve heard 793 times before. They all repeated them to me, with grace washing over my soul each time. Come to me, come to me, come to me. It’s almost silly how much they’ve been coming up, how many times they’ve been murmured in my ear as of late; it’s not silly, though, because I imagine they wouldn’t have to be said so often, with rising urgency, if I was coming. What I’m afraid must have been happening is that I was standing rooted, head hung. I must have been looking right and left, casting my eyes on anything but the path that led to the throne of God; I must have been going to other sources for infilling, and when I didn’t find it, I still did not come. And so, louder and louder, He called to me: “Come.”

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I have an abundant life. I mean that in the way that induces warm fuzzies–I have people who love me with real, true love that comes from Love so that it covers a multitude of sin, even when I break their hearts or they find out I have, in fact, picked my nose while driving. That makes for a full life, through and through. And I mean that in the way that causes my heart to jump over beats, because it’s so ridiculous–I have never, ever wanted for breakfast or blankets or even a toothbrush. That’s an impossibly full life.  I’d argue, though, that it’s the fullness of this life that sometimes keeps me from coming. In the face of so many blessings, I forget they’ve been bestowed upon me like raindrops, that they’re meant to draw my attention to the Blesser, that they’re merely the smallest indicators of what Perfect Love smells like. And this is why the call still stands, why it beckons louder than the blessings, why they are not enough.

I came that they may have and enjoy life, and have it in abundance (to the full, till it overflows). –John 10:10

See, an abundant life, while full of splendor, falls short. An abundant life, while abundant, cannot bring you to overflow. An abundant life, when only that, will leave the canyon of your soul growing to consume it so that you require more abundance to remain filled. And so we are invited, drawn, wooed–”Come to me”–so that we may experience life abundant. It is that–life to the full, life that cannot be any more, life that bubbles over with enough extra so that people can reach out and take some and then find that they want it for themselves–that is offered at the foot of the Cross. It is for that reason that despite all we’ve been given, He does not stop there. It is for that reason that He continues to whisper our names or write them across the sky or put them on the hearts of others until we glance His way. It is for life abundant, for freedom, peace, joy, for the grace that makes us perfect and compels to  be transformed at the same time. It is for life abundant, the closest thing we can get to being with Him, this world removed from us. It is because when we dwell in life abundant, we leak and shine and scream God’s glory.

And yet–I hesitate. I hear the voice, He who regards me with more affection than I can imagine, and I stand still, eyes darting. He says, “Come,” and I shake my head. He reaches out his hand, and I dodge His touch, even in the same moment that I long for it. I offer my life and take it back, calling my own the things that belong to Him. I know the sweetness of allowing my surrender to beget more and more of Him, but I pause.

No matter, it remains: “Come to me.” And again and again, I am taken back. He takes what I lay down, and gently removes what I won’t, and I receive life–and life to the full.

“You would not have called to me unless I had been calling to you,” said the Lion.  –C.S Lewis

I thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday;this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any—lifted from the no
of all nothing—human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened) [cummings]

Sometimes I have this experience: I am present, and then all of a sudden, I become aware. Oddly, awareness often distracts one from immersion within a moment–awareness causes one to step back and see, to notice with intention until the senses are full and you pass back into just being. It’s like this: I’m sitting in the same old corner of the same old coffee shop, trying to fit more words into the minutes I have left before class than is wise, but then, the timeliness of the moment fades and I am just wondering how it happened that I get to spend my days hanging out with all of the words, because that is incredible. I wonder, once I’m back to reading, if telling my professor that I got “caught up in being aware” is as good as “the dog ate my homework.”

Another day I’m walking across my beloved Quad, and the sky is so infinite that it makes me think of everything I love most. It’s been a rainy winter in these parts, but this day sings spring to us–it’s glimmering on the tops of everyone’s heads–and I stop. I touch the arm of my comrade: look, look, look. Maybe his face is asking if I’m going crazy, but I don’t know, because the sky is making me think about the way my mother looked when she gardened and how chocolate chip pound cake tastes and what it’s like to feel very pretty. We walk some more and bid one another adieu, and now I am free to let the grace take me to the last time someone gave me flowers and I am free to lose my immersion in the present and instead let the awareness of the infinite fly me and I am free.

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All week long, I am sick; sniffles and coughs and throat-gurgling that makes the people around me grimace (my apologies.) All week long the sleep is not quite long enough, it seems; all week long, I rise and shine and get brave early. (Except when I don’t, but see, that’s another story.) But despite the sickness–or maybe because of it, on account of, well, NyQuil–this keeps happening, these pullings-away where I have no choice but to extrapolate every bit of goodness out of any given moment, or I have no choice but to look in the face of something I like to leave forgotten, and either way, I am here and there all at the same time. “Can it be?” I asked our God, as sometimes I get a little too emotional for my own good, and honestly, was relishing pound cake while I walked down the sidewalk really a good idea? “Should it be?” I say it again, and I feel His smile in my bones. “Oh, but it should.”

 Every good gift and every perfect (free, large, full) gift is from above; it comes down from the Father of all [that gives] light, in [the shining of] Whom there can be no variation [rising or setting] or shadow cast by His turning [as in an eclipse]. –James 1:17

I invite you, then, into the infinite. I do not ask that you would forget where you are, but rather that you would feel it fully, that your freedom would dance you around to all of the wonder and splendor that this fallen world does indeed hold. May you cross between the place where the angels fly, the place where our spirits long to be, and come back again, bent on running this race. Let us blearily stumble into the kitchen for a mug at 5:30 a.m., prayers for strength falling from our lips, because that is life–and let us notice the way light charges our souls, because that can be life, too; and let us be free.