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Adriatic_Expansions
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Name: Miss Lady (Adria)
Country: United States
Metro: Modesto
Interests: The Christian faith, loving fearlessly, living with my hands open, saving the world, beautiful thoughts (true, noble, right, pure, lovely, admirable, excellent, or praiseworthy), breathing, giving my life away, people, quixotism, sesquipedalianism, stars, writing, testifying to the eternal truth and grace of Jesus Christ, jabberwocky, innocence, beautiful music, rain, esotericism, foreign cultures, beautiful books, clouds, green tea, playing piano poorly, alliteration, photographs, dancing, politics, enjoying art, martial arts, Thai food, being barefoot, hunting with my dad, singing in the shower, the many virtues of the color green, smiles, sunrises and sunsets, Shakespeare's sonnets, soul searching, counting airplanes, hymns, grass, mountains, water skiing, sushi, snow skiing, debate, chocolate, snow boarding, admiring scenery, eyelid kisses, Indian food, being out of style, the fragrance of jasmine flowers, climbing trees, serving people with developmental disabilities
Expertise: Hugs, making tea for my friends, and all other means of encouragement I can dream up.
Message: message meEmail: email me
AIM:  youalsoarepsyche
Member Since:
10/19/2003
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| Looking out the window, two objects fascinate me with their daily changes: the fountain at the back of the garden, and the Japanese maple directly in front of me. The fountain holds my attention because of the shifting light on the water, and the maple, not really because of the tree itself, but because of the fallen leaves scattered in the dirt below it.
Yesterday, the sun had been bright, but the weather cold. The wet edges of the fountain lit up so brilliantly that the light seemed not just to illuminate the fountain, but to sit like a silvery, solid object upon the stone surface. The apex of flowing water trapped the light, and it seemed to spin suspended like a glowing crystal ball. Yet, though the day was bright and the sky was clear and blue, frost dusted the edges of the maple leaves lying in delicate, curling piles like the pleading brown fingers of a hundred discarded doll’s hands. Today, however, clouds dulled and dissipated the sun. The stone fountain was a shadowy grey, and its water fell in heavy, opaque vines. Dew, rather than frost, clung to the leaves, the moisture causing them to unfurl and stick to one another.
For the past week, I’ve been spending the night at Meg and Dave’s house. Meg introduced me to her morning meditation routine, which combines contemplation and balance. She stands on an exercise device—a small wooden platform that teeters on a semicircular ball—upon which it requires a fair bit of skill to remain erect. As she focuses on her center of gravity, she contemplates how Christ is her center. She has found that, if her thoughts remain focused, her body remains centered, as well. When her thoughts deviate to one side or the other, she loses her balance.
I decided to add this to my morning meditation routine, as well. Performing this mental and physical exercise while looking out the window at Meg’s lovely garden has proved to be one of the most fruitful features of my quiet time. Balancing simultaneously keeps my body occupied, yet still.
Though I have thought about what it means to have Christ as my center and “Christ under me; Christ over me; Christ beside me on my left and my right,” as my book of Celtic Daily Prayer says, I have also been directly considering the concepts of balance and tension. To maintain my equilibrium, my muscles must remain contracted, and my attention mustn’t waver. I must remain still, but that stillness necessitates activity. My feet, balanced on either side of the board, only keep from tipping by exerting constant pressure against the board and against each other.
I stand there. I look into the garden. And I think. I think about action and stillness. I think about light and shadow. I think about the world and about heaven. And I think about all the things I don’t know. And I think about all the things I'm sure of. And, the more time I stand there, holding myself still in the tension, the more things those lists seem to have in common.
Desire itself is movement
Not in itself desirable;
Love is itself unmoving,
Only the cause and end of movement,
Timeless, and undesiring
Except in the aspect of time
Caught in the form of limitation
Between unbeing and being."
-T.S. Eliot, "Burnt Norton" | | |
| I love Alyosha in Brothers K so much.
I feel frequently that martyrdom would be easier than living this life, dragging day to day. In the absence of daring, dangerous quests of faith, I sometimes feel that I overcrowd my life, not as a defense or distraction, but because I feel stores of passion and energy pulsing in me... and I'm looking for ways to die, so to speak.
All of this life around me, I sometimes want to complain, is not enough. I'm too well-fed, and too comfortable. I can work through days and nights, perhaps not without consequence, but certainly without breaking. I can throw myself into ministry. I can do and do and do....
It's not enough. I still have life left, and I become frustrated at God for not placing before me a challenge that would take all the strength in me.
But....
Every morning, when I look at the ground, it is covered in sweet manna, reminding me of what I don't have to do, if only I will have the faith. And I hear God whispering me that I must become weak for His strength to be complete in me. And I hear Him calling me to stillness and relationship in Him.
And my heart struggles so hard against that. I'd rather fight.
But I have found Christ to be the one person, the one cause, deserving my utter devotion and all my stores of energy and thus I strive to unclench these fists.
To live and die for Christ...
But, for now, just to live...
Christ, have mercy. | | |
| 11.16.08
“And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.” ~T.S. Eliot
Yesterday, I stood on the highest balcony of my dorm building, playing with the strange, setting sunlight as it filtered through the a tree. I climbed a railing higher, where I could see the entire sun, looking like the weary star of a dying world. I knelt down, pressing my face between the bars, and the orange glow fell in fragments onto the silhouetted leaves. Then, I stood still, and allowed the sun make the next move. The sky’s marred, terrible light reminded me of beast enraged by a hunter’s wound. But it was so beautiful. The sky, usually so stable in its primary daytime hues, was now unpredictable and mysterious. For this eerie hour, I’d risk the lung-full of burned bits of peoples’ precious possessions.
When I checked the TV for news of the fires, a friend of mine glanced in and shook her head. “When your house is burning, what do you take with you?” I thought of my possessions. I don’t particularly prize many of them. It’s not the things I would miss, really, but the place to put them and declare that they belong—the space that I shaped by hanging up little comforting claims of identity—that would make the loss most jarring, for me. My dorm was just an empty cube, but then I pulled it around myself and returned to it over and over again. When your house is burning, you can’t take the space with you.
The sun had already collapsed beneath the horizon when I walked, again, to the balcony. I stood on the railing, balancing on my heels, with my toes as far into the empty night as I could thrust them. I looked down, intentionally setting myself off balance, and while my world spun, listed in my head the things that don’t scare me. I am not afraid of creepy bugs, or nighttime, or snakes, or solitude, or change, or new places....
I’ve been praying and playing piano for most of the day (you know what’s fun, by the way? Singing directly into the piano and listening to your voice echo faintly back in the resonance of the strings) in order to prepare for the Torrey Testimony night. I’m supposed to loosely be talking about God’s faithfulness. Specifically, I’ve been praying about sharing how and why I changed my major as a sophomore, because that incident is like a mini-play of an unending lesson in my life.
The defining thing I remember from that period—the thing I most deeply felt—was being much afraid of goal I secretly most used to describe my identity being snatched away. I had a daring dream about what my mirror would hold in the years to come, and took great comfort in it. The disappearance of that dream alerted me to my little faith and little love, and taught me—is still teaching me—how to hold my plans with open hands, and how to not watch my own achievements with so much pleasure as to make idols of them.
I think of my favorite book,Till We Have Faces, and Orual’s revelation that ”when the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you’ll not talk about joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to up openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?”
My false image of what I thought I meant, and what I wanted to be, lay crumbled. I was unsure how to move on. But God was faithful.
I’ve been thinking about the meaning of faithfulness. In Scripture, God’s faithfulness seems to mean, in simple terms, His constant presence, and His keeping of His promises. He stays. He keeps His word. He has a plan, like Jeremiah said. He walks in my darkness like Aslan beside Shasta. He walks next to me, and I cannot see His face. And I cannot see my face. Both are veiled, yet both, somehow, shine with glory, now. We wait for the revealing of the revealed. We wait to find what long ago was found.
”But--oh!--how far I have to go to find You in Whom I have already arrived! For now, oh my God, it is to You alone that I can talk because nobody else will understand. I cannot bring any other man on this earth into the cloud where I dwell in Your light, that is, Your darkness, where I am lost and abashed. I cannot explain to any other man the anguish which is Your joy, nor the loss which is the possession of You, nor the distance from all things which is the arrival in You, nor the death which is the birth in You because I do not know anything about it myself, and all I know is that I wish it were over--I wish it were begun. You have contradicted everything. You have left me in no-man’s land." ~Thomas Merton
Today, forced to notice by these strange shades, I knew the skies, as if for the first time. Their change stunned me and filled my heart with wonder.
What would I take with me, if flames licked the things I call mine? When I have a face—not the changeable masks I try to shape, but a true face—what will I see?
Someday, I shall fear nothing. | | |
| (I'm posting this so that my dear Emily Joynes will have something to read, when she gets home. I love you, Emily!)
....
I simultaneously brush my teeth with my left hand, and my hair with my right. I eat breakfast while printing out assignments. I do school work while running on the treadmill. I walk with my nose in a book. I send text messages while riding my bike. (Yes, this is dangerous, but , trust me, I receive fewer odd looks doing that than when I do arpeggios biking en route to music practice). I gulp down my morning coffee while getting dressed. My time saving habits reached a fever pitch, when I nearly attempted to cut corners by drinking coffee while brushing my teeth, the other morning. This is no exaggeration, and only goes to show how necessary that cup of coffee was!
I multitask.
In some ways, this serves me well. Some days are so full of school work that only by assigning one task to each hand—or one task to either hemisphere of my cerebrum—do I stay sane. At other times, such as my near invention of minty-fresh coffee I ponder if perhaps such habits border on pathological.
I recently read an article positing that our reading and attention skills are being eroded by internet habits. When we run across a webpage, we scan perhaps a paragraph before clicking a new link, or exploring the next search item. Rather than focusing on one text or topic for a long period of time, we click through conveniently accessible clouds of information within minutes, never bothering to grapple with any writing too abstruse.
This article left me horrified at how well I could understand the author’s propositions. This computer savvy era is used to keeping multiple windows open. I cannot count the papers I have written in Word—switching rapidly from JSTOR to google to wikipedia, of course—while listening to my iTunes and leaving youtube or one of my favorite blog in a minimized tab for study breaks.
Is it any wonder, given the instant gratification, constant stimulation, and dizzying pace of our society that, when it becomes necessary, quietness and oneness of mind are difficult? Some things must be done in stillness. I know my multitasking has crossed a boundary into sin, when I find myself mentally prewriting papers during Sunday sermons, or planning an afternoon library excursion during prayer. And, when my anxieties about school attempt to occupy the same time as my morning devotions, I know I’m in trouble.
I believe, however, Christians are called to another sort of multitasking. In church, today, my pastor read a letter from a former student of his. This woman had graduated college with an art degree, and left for North Africa to work as a professional artist. Her first series of paintings was about to be compiled into a high quality gift book. Her art is highly Christian, portraying Christ’s humility and God’s holiness. This book is going to be written in Arabic and published in the Muslim community in which she is living. She is multitasking, merging art and missions ingeniously.
As I listened to my pastor tell this girl’s story, I wondered when she had figured it out. When was this brilliant combination of gifts translated into action? When did she know? Did she ever get questions about her major, while in college, and hesitatingly answer, “Well, I’m pursuing this degree... but I’m passionate about this other thing....” Did she ever wonder whence the twain would meet? I certainly do!
At their very core, human beings are multitaskers. God formed us to have both bodily and spiritual concerns. We have both a contemplative and an active vocation. We are anomalies in this universe, odd concoctions of animal and angel that God, in his sovereign wisdom perhaps tinged with divine joviality, found it good and honoring to create. One day, after the last earthly tear is shed and the door to paradise is opened, glorification will be completed in both body and soul. The harmony between the two will never again be toppled; priorities will never again be misplaced. Come, Lord Jesus, come, that my relationships, studies, and service, my passions, callings, and hobbies, may never again anxiously vie for this day’s brief hours. Until then, may we attempt evermore to be on earth as it is in heaven.
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| I entered Mexico, not walking, but swinging. Instead of pushing the revolving doors, I jumped onto the revolving metal slats and spun into another country. It felt nice, rather than waiting in the line of cars and holding my breath to receive a pase light, to be on my own two feet, laughing a bit at the strange barrier—the few feet that make such a world of difference between us and our close neighbors. Mexico no longer feels like a foreign country to me. If anything, I wish that the most accessible parts of Mexico were less like the United States and more like the distinctive Mexican flavor for which I’ve been thirsting.
Our destination was only 20 minutes below the border: a church called La Roca. Set on a hillside, it overlooked a valley of houses stacked in seeming disregard, or outright defiance, of the jagged descent of the ground. The familiar angles of this bowl of humanity below me brought back memories. At night, I knew, lights would intermittently dot this hill like lost stars. Mariachi music and celebratory voices might echo from one neighborhood or another. Smoke would rise from the mountains as trash heaps burned all night long. The sunset, just there, would be vibrantly orange—so much more orange than at home or in LA—and I would hold my breath to watch the last gold of an expansive sun melt on that peak....
But that was not now. That was every night of the summer, rushing back to me. Now, we were sitting in the church, listening to Pastor Miguel talk about his vision for a high school, his funding struggles, and his first calling to start this church. He remembered wanting to go somewhere else, and, like Jonah, running from God. Relentlessly, God turned his heart towards Mexico. And, now, 20 years later, God was still bringing about hard, unimagined dreams.
Nineveh. As much as I tried to listen to the sincere story of the pastor, I couldn’t help but think of my own eminent life decisions. Grad school is looming uncomfortably close, and I simply can’t bring myself to terms with it. After grad school, then what? A comfy career? A family of my own? Those things sound so nice, and I’m half tempted to happily follow in the easy path before me.
The other half of my heart, however, took a few steps into that privileged, rational, well-lit adult world and whispered, “It’s quiet... too quiet....” I’m not sure I’m ready to settle into that.
I can feel untapped wells of passion in me, unused and desperate to be let loose. If God has gifted me academically, if He has given me the skill set to be a good Speech-Language Pathologist, He has equally as strongly given me a taste for adventure and a fearlessness that must, must, be used. What good is it that I’m not afraid of spiders, if I am living in a house that’s free of them? What good is that I’m not afraid of new places, new people, new foods, or new cultures if I’m just supposed to live here? What good is it that I love to work with my hands, love physical exertion, if my most regular physical activity is a circular track that never goes anywhere? And what good is this heart if I can’t use it to its limits?
Sometimes, it’s all I can do to keep myself from falling at the feet of the strangers around me. Their beauty and their pain make me want to weep. The reflection of God in their eyes makes me worship. Pastor Miguel’s story made my heart surge with hope, joy, and dread. Nineveh. Where is my Ninevah? Where is my Tarshish? If only I could be as lucky as Jonah. I would give anything to be tossed overboard a stormy ship, if only my life’s direction could be as clear as his.
I know I’ve been called to work with people who have disabilities. I love children, and I want a whole baseball team’s worth of my own, if possible. And yet, I know this is not all life will be, for me. Something else burns. I just don’t know where or when.
I love reading about the lives of martyrs. To me, nothing is more beautiful than their sacrifice, no life more full than theirs. If only my life could be so full. There are so many things I would die for.
A Saturday in Mexico was significant and beautiful, because I was really doing something. I wasn’t learning about doing something. I wasn’t planning to do something. I was doing it. These two hands helped carry the makings of a classroom, and helped a child across a set of money bars. These are little things, but they are actions, infinitely refreshing to a college student who spends her days largely in preparation for other days, uncomfortably uncertain what those days will actually hold, or even if they will come (God only knows...).
On our way back, we had to wait in a much longer line. There would be no swinging through the strict US customs. While standing in the long line, my tired eyes randomly flitted over rows of street vendors. I spied my favorite goat’s milk caramel wafers, and pointed them out to the group, extolling their incomparable deliciousness. Sarah, our leader, asked me if I wanted to buy some, then insisted, despite my decline. We quickly stepped out of line to purchase the candy, then rushed to rejoin the group. A customs officer saw us, “Girls, you can’t cut in line. If you want to go to America, you have to wait in the back of the line.” Our protests that we weren’t cutting were obviously futile. We dejectedly walked to the back of the amassing group of people. After a few minutes of fervent indignance, mixed with exhaustion, we reminded ourselves that patience is a fruit of the Spirit, and started talking about Mexico, witnessing, family, and purpose. Before we knew it, we were with our group, again.
We had been patient. We had done as we were told, but had made the best of it. We had done something with time that could have only consisted of annoyed glances ahead. There is practical truth in this lesson that I wish I could remember as, frustrated, I pour over my plans for next year. It’s good to sometimes remember small of a space one really needs in order to dance. All shall be well. God never told us to have endless resources at our fingertips, or a plethora of career options, or an optimal education. He told us to follow Him. He called lepers without that golden, insubstantial catalyst called “opportunity,” as well as literate doctors.
On the drive home, it rained. I watched electricity arc and sparkle on the power lines, loving the clarity of the air. God is the ruler of all: chaos, dreams, children, and every distant land. All shall be well.
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