I thought about Mary today as I drove home from work, studying the sky in its darkening wintry splendor. I tried to imagine her, fully pregnant, her hand across her stomach as she went about her daily work, washing clothes in cold water, tending animals, feeding her husband and herself. I thought about the bleak world she lived in, without redemption, without hope, without Christmas or even the man of Jesus to lean so heavily on. He had yet to be born. Yet He was within her.

I can't imagine a life without Him in it, without His history or my future with Him, without His voice or His mere comforting presence. I don't want to live in this world without Him, yet that's exactly what she did. I wonder when it hit her that her son was the Messiah. Was it when Gabriel visited her? When the Holy Spirit came upon her? When John leapt in his mother's womb because he could feel the Son of God? Surely her labor was as real as anyone's...without an epidural. Without a breathing coach. Just her. Laboring in pain. Feeling the weight of sin as she birthed that precious human being, that baby who would be King.

I've been considering the majesty of this season, as I do every year when Christmas nears. There is so much weight placed on the "magic" of the holidays and I feel it too...it seems as if everyone is experiencing it- an ephemeral comfort that always leads to the feeling of eternal emptiness. Maybe that's why all the fantastical movies open around the holidays. They provide just enough reprieve from our mundane and very real lives, give us a glimpse of an imaginative world of possibility like in Harry Potter, Twilight, Narnia, The Golden Compass, Lord of the Rings, Avatar etc., then they whisper in our hopeful ear, "Suspend your disbelief..." and promise that for two hours, we will be whisked away on an unforgettable adventure. Even Santa Clause promises something exciting beyond the realm of oxygen...

But what happens to me in the real moments, in the true life moments when the dead-weight of gravity grounds me more than I'd like, is an impossible need for hope for a life that is beyond this one- a life that so far outshines this place that I'll never want to return to this earth. I think about that night in Bethlehem that must have felt so heavy and long and hopeless. Dark and freezing, dirty and disgraceful and as far from "home" as one can feel. And in the midst of a tired era, in the midst of the most impossible situation and against all odds and science and belief, there was a baby born. A baby Whose very Name gives me chills when it is spoken. A baby to whom every knee shall bow and every tongue confess His Lordship. A baby who is named Mighty Counselor, Wonderful, Savior of His people, the Consolation of Israel. And in that moment the angels sang and Christmas was birthed. Behold, here is your King, here is your Love. Here is your Savior. Come and adore Him. Eternity is yours. The impossible is yours. Reconciliation has come. Freedom has come. Christ Jesus the Everlasting, the Messiah, has come. Fall on your knees.

100 years...


I realized something today, while driving past the rainbow umbrellas at the corner fruit stand on Loyola Street and listening to "100 Years." It has been too long an interlude since that song actually meant something to me. Perhaps I no longer listen to it because when I do, that sense of Romantic nostalgia is gone and all that is left in its place is the desire to feel the way I once did when I tuned my ear to listen.


It has only recently occurred to me that I have given up much of myself in an effort to "serve His Kingdom," but sadly, I have given up the wrong self. I have idolized that which ought not to have been idolized and have misplaced my faith, never knowing. Through the roughest sanctifying process I have ever been through, God is teaching me my value in being His and His alone. This is what it means to grow; this is the pain of letting go.



I've been looking at my life through a rather critical lens lately, wondering how and when I became too busy to write, when I ever chose to let beauty pass before me without reconciling it somewhere so I could examine it later and commit it to memory, or how I ever allowed creation, poetry, art, humanity and salvation be lost on me when it came time to remember and write about them. I feel like a character in a Stuart Dybek short-story- as though I'm walking down the street behind my former selves, all of us falling in historical order- my sixteen year old self, my twenty year old self, my twenty-five year old self. We're all walking down that lonely road home, hoping for a life we don't dream will fail.


In any case, this self-preservation quest/quarter-life crisis/first real right of passage is causing me to write again, and to remember the things of old that first made me want to seek truth. The good news is that I know I'm not alone in this- this feeling of inadequacy at 25. It just seems to be such a placeless notch on the time continuum- old enough to be held responsible for things not turning out the way one thinks they should, yet too young to have it all figured out, although my mother would say "you'll never have it all figured out." And the odd thing- this season of self-seeking isn't separate from my knowledge of sovereignty, just a weird grey area that causes me to think. And to pray.


Regardless, I have the Hope of the world and know that even in drought, joy still comes. A friend told me the other day that she's been here before. "That song will mean something to you again. And if it doesn't, pick another one that does," she said.


"Yeah, but what if I never feel that way again? What if it's lost on me forever?"


"I promise that it's not. You'll be happy again. Just give it some time."


So that's what I'm trying to do- give it some time. I've decided to take a summer sojourn (definitively, a sojourn means to stay for a time in a place; I think this idea is lovely) and remember the things that once meant something to me- like the Frio when we were young and the world unfurled like a red carpet before us, or what we all experienced but never spoke of when we ventured in the French Quarter, trailing the Mississippi and lace behind us when we came back to Texas, Cecil on the couch between poetry and architectural renderings, running through the fountain the night Bear left, New York at the change of the season and the magic of Paumanok, the color of the moon the night we left Egypt, my last conversation with Alex- "You know I love you, right?"- "Yes, Melly, let's run!"-London in the rain with my sisters, holiness on the Nile River the first time Cairo ever heard "God of the City,"--everything we lost when we left South Congress, and the perpetual feeling that something significant was left behind somewhere, or that something was lost in translation as I leapt from my formative years to now...

There was a time...

**There was a time when a song could move an entire room of people and for a moment, our experiences amounted to something greater than the human condition. And even after the last lyric was sung, the music still hung in the air.

It's been a long time since I've considered lunar cycles or forsythias, but tonight, tonight after a tiresome season of unrequited hope, I saw the moon hanging orange and majestic in the color of the harvest... and I sighed. That feeling has been a long time coming. So I drove to an old place out on 360 where the hills part briefly and the city-lights shine through, and for the first time in years, I felt that familiar longing in my soul of absolute delight in creation and the driving force to write. I parked my car and even though I didn't want to, turned off Kendall Payne's "Moonsong" and sat still for a quiet moment.

"Be still and know that I am GOD."

The moon was white and shining by this time and the evasive city lights that always elude my grasp continued to glimmer across O.Henry's city, yet the Prince of Peace was nearby. There were no words to say or song to sing, just my bruised heart offered up to a King. Carve my name on Your heart, oh Lord, for Your name is carved onto mine and I am engraved on the palm of Your hand.

"Forgive me if too close I lean, my human heart on Thee."

And for a moment, sitting in the dark on a well-trodden street, on a Saturday night in the city I love, I remembered who I once was and was recalled to who I'm supposed to become. So even while this season of my life may mean soul-sickness, I know where my hope resides, and in Him there I will also be.

"Failing to fetch me, at first keep encouraged. Wishing me one place, search another. I stop, somewhere, waiting for you."

"I bare my heart in all my poems..."

I've been reading a lot of poetry lately, sitting in the slant from the sunlight that comes in through my living room window, trying to remember what it means to have poignant and poetic moments in everyday life, and more importantly to recognize them. I spent my formative years trying to capture these moments on paper as they happened infrequently, always with the wrong people and at the wrong time- which retrospectively, probably renders them that much more significant- nonetheless, there was a time when I knew what it meant to long for artistry amidst the dull of the mundane.

It isn't so much that this part of my life has been forgotten, but rather that I fear it will. I sometimes worry that I've stifled this part of who I am for so long that she's almost gone now, sitting on a dusty shelf somewhere next to well-loved toys and dreams that haven't happened, fading in the quiet afternoon light. I seldom have time for documenting sentiment, or pondering the majesty of the cosmos or the striations on the earth, the tragic beauty of the human condition or the sheer heartache of days gone by. Yet still there is this longing...

I always joke with friends that I would not have been hired at my current job if they knew I was a writer. This is because the job that I do requires much attention to detail, superhuman organizational skills (which I don't have) and the ability to switch quickly from one topic to the next without much time for processing (which is why I've decided that I've developed adult-onset ADD). Funnily enough, I spent the first six months there trying to remain afloat and the next six trying to figure out why I was so tired. Now, almost two years into it, I've finally hit the groove yet while I love the work I do, it isn't as satisfying as writing has always been. I've discovered that even though I'm capable of living life at the speed of light, I'm much more inclined to sit beneath a magnolia tree somewhere, contemplating the truths of fiction and writing the poetry of my life.

So, in a hopeful resolution to merging my two divergent selfs- the poetic and the real-world self- I have decided to take up writing again, and this is my public attempt. The truth is, even amid all the chaos and hurried busyness that is this life, I've never stopped writing. I've written for time immemorial which is likely the reason I desire it so when the season is dry and my pen is weary. However, this time I will write with unction and without restraint.

A Realization of Self...

I read once, perhaps a letter by one of the Bronte sisters, or Christina Rosetti or someone of a great name, that she wrote by candlelight always, and with violet ink. It reminded me of the ink that I used to bleed all over my papers when I would write on the roof back on 38th street...when I would hide my thoughts on imagined-papyrus and see the city between the foliage on the magnolias. Their leaves fell in cascades in our yard. I used to sit up there for good moments, writing down my life, sketching the cityscape from my favorite vantage point, praying past the moon to the God Who never fails me. That year I learned a little of who I was becoming.

My life now is no less than it was then, only now it is unfamiliar. Only the pink light that slants in through my windows brings a fragrant remembrance of my earlier life in the olds of Hyde Park, on the sweetest street in the City of the Violet Crown. I sometimes think I'll go back there, sneak up the steps and climb out onto the summit of roof, sound my barbaric yawp over the rooftops of this world, and steal a token of time from my past. If only...