place

Donald Trump is my president

January 20, 2017 by Lyndsey 4 Comments

Dear United States of America,

I first knew you as a thousand and one telephone poles whooshing past the car windows on the drive from Central Florida to Oklahoma City. Crossing America meant Cracker Barrel and, if we were lucky, a hotel with a swimming pool. Later in life, the drive began in Georgia, but the result was the same: it ended up in a foreign landscape, but familiar hugs. Visiting our family made us special and different in its own way; sometimes Oklahoma would come up in conversation and friends would remark that they’d never been anywhere near it. ‘I’ve been to Oklahoma,’ we could say, and we would tell about cows and cowboys, oil rigs and spicy food and about just how flat a place could be. America, you are a thousand and one places perfectly foreign and absolutely familiar.

You are the suburbs of my growing-up, tacky and prosperous and petty. You are the mountains I call my homeland, rolling and wise until the afternoon thunderclap. You are the county fair, the rodeo and the revival. You are the pool table where I drank Mountain Dew and listened to stories of jail, abuse, and abortion, where deep poverty grabbed me by the collar and dared me to not to look away. There, too, I learned honesty and hospitality and love from those storytellers, and they saved my life.

You are the burned-over industrial city where I brought a wool peacoat to the fight against blowing torrents of Lake Ontario settling under an eerie city glow. You gave me food stamps there, and every penny they saved me went to fund my first semester of seminary—maybe someday you’ll tell me somehow whether you are glad of your investment. There, there was a foreign place that could very well have gotten the best of me; but from the beginning there was, too, a man who felt like home.

You are the little town of a big city where I learned to sail, lived with 23 others in a mansion, rode the last Green Line train of the night, served food to Michael Pollan and Michael Dukakis, smoked cigarettes on a roof under the Citgo sign, and had the theological shit beat out of me. You are all the people I met the likes of whom I’d never known before, a school full of outspoken Koreans and Puerto Ricans and gays and tree huggers and Black people and even a South Dakotan, who grabbed me by the collar and loved me hard.

You are the wonders of the world I’ve seen without a passport: The Atlantic, Niagara Falls, Sedona, Lake Tahoe, Chilhowee Mountain, the Potomac, Half Dome, Eufaula Lake, the Grand Canyon, the Adirondacks, Amicalola Falls, the Rockies, the Pacific. Your land, America; if I ever despair entirely of your people, I will take solace in the land that bears us all up.

Of course I learned about you, too, in school, most often about your unprecedented birth and your unbearable schism only fourscore and seven years later. I am grieving for what I did not learn, like the family history everyone was embarrassed to tell a child; I am grieving every day for a different person who built this nation and in return received influenza, musket balls, beatings, broken treaties, broken bones, families rent, chains, poverty, lynchings, tenements and typhoid, internment camps, segregation, deportation, death. Still, with every grieving person I say that I will always dwell in grief and yet must always dwell in some kind of hope. There is no innocent country; and though I know now just how fantastical it is, I perhaps love the idea of you all the more now, America. That some hotheaded Yankees would plunk themselves down and Declare Independence as if they could just do such a thing. That they would brashly scribble that all men are created equal without knowing what they could possibly mean, and then invent the mechanisms for all of us to spend the next 240 years telling them what they had meant. Government of the people, by the people, for the people. You made it happen first, and it has always been a bold and silly, roundabout and beautiful experiment, burdened by evil but straining toward justice.

If there is one thing I can say for sure about President Obama, it is that he has not only governed, he has led this country. He called upon the best in us while demanding the utmost from himself, and we could always look to him when we needed an example of humility, grace, and strength.

In the waning days of his administration, President Obama repeatedly exhorted us to participate with him in the peaceful transfer of power, not sullenly or forlornly but by allowing the strength of our convictions to propel us to become better citizens. If you do not like your democracy, you can change it. Since the election, you already have. Keep on calling your representatives. Keep on learning about your local government. And keep on helping your neighbors cut their grass. Democracy and neighborliness are hard work, but they do not have to be lost arts.

America, we are tacky and brash and very few of our English accents are really all that nice-sounding. We are so many fractured groups, nothing we ever do will be cozy, or elegant, maybe not even civil. And in my opinion, we have spent a very long time doing a very bad job at this democracy thing. I’d say we elected an enemy of democracy. But he cannot destroy it. Democracy can only destroy itself.

Because I have loved so many Americas, I will not capitulate to President Trump’s monolithic vision of one. But because I have loved so many Americas, I will participate in its democracy, the only government I know that tries to honor them all. I will remain subject to this crappy and ever-evolving republic; I will capitulate to the will of my fellow citizens that he form the executive branch of our government. Then I will do everything I can to advocate that we make our democracy less crappy, from improving the education system that undergirds this form of government, to convicting fewer people as felons.

But I will not arrogantly pretend that I alone choose my president. To say that Trump is not my president would be to say that this is not my country.

And that, beloved, I cannot bear.

Dylann Roof and me

January 12, 2017 by Lyndsey Leave a Comment

I heard the truth about my town in Georgia—home base since I was 13—over the radio, from a woman in Philadelphia. It was a Terry Gross interview with the author of a book released last summer about the history of Forsyth County. Maybe it was a run-of-the-mill interview, sometimes even if you’re a Terry fan they’re a little boring, but to me it was bizarre and hurtful and fascinating and horrible all at the same time: hearing a man’s voice in the little car speakers reciting the details of two lynchings that took place on the town square where I had purchased a marriage license two months before.

To be more precise, it was all of those things after the fact, because my response to overwhelming awful things is always immediate dissociation. At the time, I thought mostly of the classrooms two blocks from that square, where they’d taught us about the formation of the KKK on Stone Mountain but not about the lynchings in our town. Not about the weeks after the lynchings when every black person in the county was driven out of their homes. Not about the family that tried to quietly return and woke up to dynamite under their house. Not about the fact that there’s no record of who survived and who didn’t.

There were rumors, of course, about whose fault it might be that our county, even in the 2000s, held far fewer black people than any other in Georgia despite its rapid growth: a few white hoods in the 60s, a sign warning black people out before sundown. But those rumors held no lynchings and no expulsions by night riders and certainly no mention of the massive protest in the 80s, residents demanding they be allowed to keep their county white.

In December I wrapped gifts, packed an enormous duffel bag, and in the last second before leaving Charleston for home I downloaded the book. It’s a quick read, really just a chronological telling of events. I’d expected a bit more from it—a primer on how to feel or what to do would have been nice. Instead, there were the happenings, then the end; and then I wandered about the county, visiting friends and the Dairy Queen downtown, in a state of surreality, seeing the 1910s superimposed over every place that composed my beloved home. The stolen homesteads of freed slaves forgotten beneath stately churches; the site of the rally, now some of the county’s most valuable retail real estate; and always, the lynchings of teenagers in the square.

I don’t know if it is merely naive or some much more serious moral and imaginative failing, but it was one thing to know of lynchings somewhere in those mountains, and another thing to stare down a picture of one across the street from Sal’s pizza place. It was one thing to hear rumors that black people had been unwelcome on our streets long ago, but another to read with what inhuman ferociousness their absence had been enforced up until my own lifetime.

I have not spoken much about all this. I am just beginning to grieve the place I thought I knew.

Even when we speak about the importance of history, we often act as though it is a collection of case studies that might sometime offer useful analogies to our own time, rather than recognizing that it is a part of us. We are learning every day, too, that this is no metaphor, our very selves shaped by history: trauma is passed on through human DNA as surely as injustice is passed on through our institutions. It is the privileged who study history; it is the oppressed who remember it. I came to adulthood asking why so much is wrong with the world. Those who bear the brunt of the wrong have always known.

And at the same time that it’s easy, once you start, to trace the series of events leading my people to have things so much easier than others, it’s impossible to quantify my own individual part in any of it. It’s nothing: I never asked or hoped for things to be this way any more than the victims did. And it’s infinite: my family came to Forsyth for its peace, prosperity, and Good Schools, all of which were uniquely available because of the county’s history and uniquely available to us.

It is crass to speak of quantifying such things anyway. But, I think, even the sagest of “woke white people” can unknowingly hope to do so, as if that might be the first step to erasing the hurt. In the interview through the car speakers, I recognized a certain instinct in the book’s author: a desire for absolution. As weeks went by and I tunneled down into my own distress, I found at the root of the pit in my stomach was an absurd hope: maybe if I do enough, or give enough up to others, I can become innocent of this.

But none of us will ever be innocent of it.

The Bible speaks often of communal sin. This, like most things in the Bible, is inconvenient, if not incomprehensible, to the individualistic myths that make up the American way. Some well-meaning people who have worked very hard not to commit sins will probably always refuse to comprehend it, protecting instead the idea of their self-made virtue. In so doing, they will refuse to understand the basic fabric of the world and perhaps of God: that we all belong to one another. We can’t stand up a self unattached to the others who remake us every day, any more than the squares of a quilt can be without the others.

I don’t know how anyone makes sense of history and its injustices without feeling this fabric under their fingers.

The Bible also speaks often of communal redemption. Thanks be to God, the un-innocent belong at the family table.

Now I live in a city that has prospered from the products of slavery since its inception three hundred and fifty years ago. We are still getting to know one another, so I cannot say much about what, exactly, this means for Charleston. But I can say that the city will never become innocent of the shooting at Mother Emanuel, certainly not by deeming a single life valueless and then offering that warped nothing as if it could be a sacrifice to justice.

Everyone is angry at Dylann Roof, but behind the anger lies fear: fear that he might be one of us. To entertain the idea of Roof in prison for life is to imagine him as something other than a monster that must be put down. It is to face the fact that a man, mentally sound enough to represent himself at trial, found little evidence in the society around him to dissuade him from the racist alternate reality he’d chosen. That man believed he could start a race war by carrying out his crime in the right city: what was once a city of enslaved people, ruled by a fearful and violent minority of white men.

Perhaps the victims and their families should be the ones to sentence Dylann Roof, but they are not. And we all sit in silent judgment of him: a jury of his peers. To leave Roof alive would be painful, to say the least. It would inspire justified outrage on several fronts. But to kill him means to label him irredeemable, while somehow maintaining that we are not. That is false. By killing him, instead, we further damn ourselves in the belief that the history that inspired Roof can be purged by wiping him out.

To leave Roof alive would be to look into his hate-filled face and force ourselves to recognize the fear, supremacy, and violence that every day enslave us all. Only when we stop settling for the scapegoat will we finally reach the beginning of our own repentance.

a blank space, baby

October 19, 2016 by Lyndsey 3 Comments

One day Nate and I decided to move from Plymouth, Massachusetts to Charleston, South Carolina, and three weeks later we did it. I think I was about as ready as anyone can be for something like that. I think I was about 80% ready.

And usually with these huge changes, I’ve been a lot less ready—but someone else has been ready for me. Americorps, grad school, they had routines and duties and people lined up for me to throw myself into. I knew people who’d moved to new cities completely alone after college, but I couldn’t relate to them. I envied them their spending money and their professional-wardrobe jobs; only now can I even approach any understanding of the crushing loneliness they must have felt, dropping their keys every night in whatever tiny apartment they had found. Of what it’s like to feel a riptide pulling you away from your perfectly fine life, to follow it with some excitement, and then to ask the ocean several times when you’ll be there until you realize that this, treading water in this wide nothing, is it.

In our case, we went from spending, collectively, four hours a day commuting, to forty minutes a day. We went from having four or five groups of people we could make weekend plans with, to zero. From a little downtown church we liked to the land of a thousand (seemingly identical) churches. From a cozy little house that seemed made of windows to an apartment whose blank white walls seem to expand, retreating us farther into the dim building, overnight. I went from a bustling startup office space 40 hours a week to working from home 30 hours a week.

It’s been an eerily quiet few weeks.

—

I bought Shauna Niequist’s Present Over Perfect on a bit of a whim, and when I started reading it, one little chunk at a time, trying to drag it out and absorb everything, I was immediately disappointed. The writing was so lovely and funny and honest, the story so familiar and yet different from mine, but the whole entire damn thing is all about living a slower, more grounded life. About eliminating commitments and half-real relationships and tasks of imaginary importance.

To say that I resented being told I should do what I was being forced to do would be an understatement. My eyes would travel from the book to my blank planner to Nate, my only human connection within a four-hour drive, and somehow, knowing that millions of people would revel in this state of affairs only made me deeply, inexplicably bitter toward those people. But Shauna kept drawing me in. And I started cooking.

It’s our shared love of elaborate meals that will keep me reading every book Niequist writes until the end of time. If at every other hour of the day I hated feeling alone, unuseful, and boring, I was able to lose myself in cooking. I gloried in our new dishwasher. Our CSA shares started coming, baskets brimming with local food, and this, at least, made me feel that the ground of South Carolina was mine, too. I made bread. Nate made me breakfast sandwiches out of it.

And some combination of that near-daily ritual with Shauna’s gentle words—full of wonder at how lovely the quiet life can be—soon made me half-grudgingly, half-elatedly realize that this little window is a gift. Who in the world gets to make food for their family every day? How many people are ever offered such a blank slate after they’ve grown up a little, figured out what they really want? How often does anyone get such extravagant margins with which to decide how they will live? How many books would my favorite mama-writers have written in the amount of time I’ve already wasted?

These questions, though, they often take on the tone of your life. When I was still thinking of this time as an exile, they felt accusatory. Of course I knew I should be grateful. Of course I was inadequate to the task of making the most of the situation.

Until, as is usually the case with me, I started pretending to be the good person I wasn’t.

I just got tired of railing against the situation, and stopped. And then there was even more of the dreaded, horrible quiet.

And then there was a whisper: stop seeking. just wait.

And in that blank space, like floating in water, the beginnings of a life began to emerge, one little thing at a time. Not the things that are, like, recognizable as a life—a full schedule and a full travel mug of coffee and a car and people who breathlessly tell you how much they appreciate you as you pass each other rushing in different directions. Just, the realization that I am not only able but, in fact, driven to collect as many houseplants as possible. Just a little writing opportunity I wouldn’t have found if it weren’t for my new days off. A cascade of writing ideas where before there had been only overwhelm. A few prayers besides the same frustrations, fears, and questions I’d been hurling at the sky the past many months. And a lot of fresh-vegetable meals.

This may not be anyone else’s definition of success, but this is my life. This is the life I get to say yes to, one little thing at a time.

a place to stay

August 26, 2016 by Lyndsey Leave a Comment

One way to become a minimalist is to have 15 addresses in 8 years.

Our house has gone from a total shambles to starting to clear itself up—all the traces of Nate and me soon to disappear. I am catching a breath on this last day in our first house together, a cottage in a pine forest that’s terribly far from anything useful and is the very definition of a little newlywed nest. We will miss it.

There was a time, maybe for the last year and a half, when leaving any place made me feel physically ill. Going on a weekend trip, coming back from the trip; it wasn’t that I ever hated my destination, just that I was dizzy from the revolving door my life has been since moving North. Between changing dwellings, visiting Nate, flying home twice a year, and attending weddings and holidays, I measured my life in time until the next departure. I was an expert at Greyhound travel and duffel-bag-packing.

I bought some of those big plastic storage tubs and lived out of them when I wasn’t living out of the duffel. A bunch of my stuff has just resided in there for years now; I know where it is and if I need it, I use it, then carefully repack it for the next move. I used the tubs as furniture. They have handles. They have kept my clothes and stuff safe in rain, in suspicious basements, on airplanes, with no tape and no box cutters. I love the tubs. For a while they were the most constant and dependable things in my life.

I don’t know if the place we’re going will be a place we never leave, but I know that South is the right direction. A year ago now, I took a month off to recalibrate my life, and it felt like everything that had ever been true was saying to me that moving North had been a good thing, and that now it is time to come home.

And so this leaving doesn’t feel like illness, but like healing. There are people who love New England, who think that even the bad things about it are, in the end, still the way things should be. I was never going to be one of those people; this leaving was always inevitable.

I’m grateful for our nest. I’m grateful for a husband who believes me when I say I don’t know what my career will be, but this move carries the urgency of a calling. I’m grateful to be moving towards establishing a place to put down roots and pick up responsibilities, a place that becomes part of us and we, of it. Something more than a place to stay.

Dear Governor Deal

November 18, 2015 by Lyndsey Leave a Comment

Or, a Southern lady has a word.

Dear Governor Deal,

I am a deeply proud native and voter in the state of Georgia. I belong to the white, well-off, Christian population you count among your constituency, and I am ashamed beyond belief by your most recent executive order barring Syrian refugees from Georgia. Your actions are not representative of our views and wishes, and they defy common sense as well as American values.

Let us consider the people involved in this situation.

First, there are the Syrian refugees. You point out that there are gaps in the process for “screening those from war torn areas,” and of course you are correct. It is because their homes and lives are war-torn that these people cannot be vetted as we might wish. Their clothes and their documents are literally torn by terror in the same way that their homes are demolished, their governments and police records disintegrated, and their lives ripped to shreds by violence. No one hates and fears terrorism more than Syrian refugees. No one hopes to live as a simple, productive citizen, to maintain order and normalcy, more than a Syrian refugee. Surely Lady Liberty calls to Syria when she proclaims,
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp,” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me;
I raise my lamp beside the golden door.”

Some of these people have already made their way to Georgia, and your treatment of them is particularly disturbing. Since they have already endured a vetting process, demanding that their backgrounds be “confirmed” displays an attitude dangerously similar to that of the Americans who interned Japanese-American residents during World War II. Fear of others based solely on their nationality is the definition of xenophobia.

Next there are the terrorist groups and individuals who wish to do harm to innocent civilians – including, conceivably, Georgians. These people are full of anger and hatred, and their movements thrive on the hatred and fear of others. Continuing to stir up suspicion and anxiety towards Syrians allows them to accomplish their goals: making us feel constantly unsafe, and convincing more of their countrymen that we hate them. We do not hate them, Mr. Deal. We will not be bullied into hatred or fear of anyone.

Because these people are so hell-bent on doing harm, refugee visas have very little to do with their ability to carry out their plans. They are not foiled, as if they might say to one another, “We will not be allowed to take up residence in Georgia; let’s get a beer instead.” If terrorists care to attack Georgians, their nimble organizations will find ways to do so. They have American recruits in their ranks, means of traveling between countries and states, false documents, conventional weaponry and evil imaginations. It is reasonable to increase security around transportation hubs and entertainment venues. It is unreasonable to exclude desperate people from our great state based on their country of origin. Multiple acts of terrorism have been committed this year in our country by white men with guns, and no such panic has gripped our people.

hkscc2w As we wrestle with these decisions, the main group of people under consideration here is the citizens of Georgia. Twenty-something tornado seasons have taught me that Georgians are not a people given to panic. We are a courageous, resilient, and occasionally even belligerent lot, and we will not be cowed by the tactics of extremists. We choose to follow the example of our own Dr. King by driving out hatred with love. We do not choose the hollow and pretended “empathy” referred to in your letter to President Obama. “Empathy” is a transliteration of the Greek word for compassion; both words literally mean suffering with. If taking risks and sharing the blessings of our rapidly growing economy (or as you prefer to say, our “valuable limited resources”) constitutes suffering, these are things we are willing to do for the sake of mitigating the horrendous pain of our fellow human beings. Courage means doing the hard thing, and we are prepared to meet that challenge.

The Georgia I know is a place of abundance. We have found room for more and more as our population has boomed in recent decades. We are proud that we have an abundance of human and natural resources to share. Do you wish to imply that, under your administration, it is a place of scarcity?

The Georgia I know is a place of faith. It is 79% Christian, and the Christian faith tells us undeniably to welcome the stranger. Our faith – our God – absolutely requires that we act with generosity and love towards friends, foreigners, and enemies alike. We will not live like those who have no hope nor like those who believe God deals only in afterlives. We choose love for others and trust in God; we choose them tangibly, and we choose them now. We welcome the hurting and make space for their healing, terrorists be damned.

The Georgia I know, Governor Deal, is absolutely misrepresented by your actions today. We are famous throughout the world for our hospitality, and you panic-driven knee-jerk reaction to others’ tragedies is an insult to my home and my Mama’s pecan pie. This is a matter for hard thought, prayer, and democratic debate, not for bull-headed executive orders and absurd harassment of our Syrian neighbors trying to reclaim a single normal day while they still live. The Southern way is to greet guests as precious gifts, not as liabilities. The people of your state demand that we be allowed to lead this country in offering a place of rest to refugees, rather than cowering in our corner and succumbing to suspicion and hatred as our enemies hope we will do.

The final character, Mr. Deal, is you. Some sweet old church ladies taught me that what goes around, comes around. Georgia stands for warmth, hospitality, civil rights, and plain old faith. What do you stand for? From here it seems you act out of reactionary panic or political opportunism. Be bigger than your actions today.

With all my kudzu-covered heart,
Lyndsey Graves
Cumming, Georgia

This letter will be posted today in handwritten and printed form to Governor Deal’s Contact Form and to
Office of the Governor
206 Washington Street
111 State Capitol
Atlanta, Georgia 30334

Please feel free to post this letter or any part of it with your own name and details to Governor Deal. You can also type a letter and have it mailed for you for free here.

Seven states’ worth of home

October 2, 2015 by Lyndsey Leave a Comment

It is cloudy and dark, puddles merging into ponds, barely-orange leaves prematurely dripping from sodden trees. “What a beautiful day,” says the man across the coffee shop without a trace of irony. It is the relieved sigh of Cape Cod after summer, after tourists in jaunty nautical garb, after traffic. The locals take back the rock-studded beaches, windy and drippy though they are – loved.

I am back in Boston. After a hectic week, I tag along with Nate to work in Hyannis. I have accidentally crashed a morning gossip-gathering of older folks, skirting the edges with my backpack. My enormous backpack, which has accompanied me to seven states* in the past four weeks. Which holds everything a person could need – clothes, toothpaste, and books – without complaint. After all of this journeying, I feel like a sea-creature hefting my home onto my back.

When I packed this bag to leave Boston in August, it gave me a sick feeling. It is the eleventh time I have moved in seven years, inspiring a preconscious bodily dread of leaving any place – even for journeys I have happily chosen.

There is much I could say about the ways I’ve centered in the past month. I have discovered that sometimes growing pains are, in fact, wounds, and that the growth is only complete when the wounds have begun to heal. Returning to my places of comfort and safety in the South allowed me to stop triage-ing the nicks and scrapes of the last three years; but not because I took a few weeks off of work.

It was because of the way I was welcomed. In all the borrowed places me and my backpack have alighted this month, soul-friends have made space and made food and made time for me to be. In long, long conversations with past professors, in breakfast with my parents, on a drive to the woods, I have been given peace. It seems that at some point I dropped off pieces of my heart with these dear humans, and years later they are giving them back, reminding me who I am. Reminding me Who is my home, even when the only constant in life is travel-size toiletries and the sound of zippers.

It has been fitting to end my journey, in the few days before I move into my next place, as a literal guest in my own house – on my former roommates’ futon. Even in brief meetings I discover that they, too, hold pieces of me in trust; and in that knowledge I discover a deep peace with the transitory phase of life I have been longing to escape. Finally I remember it is an adventure and a gift to be a sojourner, a not-quite-local of so many neighborhoods. Finally I begin to find some love for New England in me. Finally I recall how to be present in only one state at a time. And I can pray with faith that my many friends who are far from home will find welcome. Wanderers and missionaries: there will be home again.

I have heard it is in the character of God to make room for others. If so, there are few holier acts than to give hospitality, and few more humbling than to receive it.

——

*I’ve spent nights in Georgia, Tennessee, Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina, New York, and Massachusetts.

season-surrender

February 9, 2015 by Lyndsey Leave a Comment

The snow, falling in huge flakes, is mesmerizing. It just keeps coming out of the sky, five feet in the last two weeks, but I cannot tear my eyes away. Today there is another storm, buckets of the stuff racing to earth, like it’s been shot out of a confetti cannon – really beautiful but a little alarming, a little frenetic.

Today there is a snow emergency, schools and businesses closed, plows and snowblowers failing hilariously to keep up with the frozen deluge. Trolley-trains are stuck on the tracks. The revelers who came out to play in the last two blizzards have had their fill of wet, cold, and wind, and the streets are quiet, bare. All the shapes of things become muted by the draped thick, still blanket; all the tracks of vehicles and people quickly fill in again – the ground’s self-healing armor. Soon enough, the city will just be coated in dirty sludge again, but as long as the snow still falls, it is absolutely, achingly white and flat, a perfect fondant. As long as the snow still falls, this third storm in two weeks demands and finally receives our resigned surrender. Today at least is nature’s day.

Today, cozily buried yet again, it is not hard for me to be gracious to myself when my body and mind are sluggish, inclined to hibernate. With nowhere to be, it is not hard to let my work proceed apace without rush and worry. If I watch the snow fall long enough, it is not hard to lose the need to distract myself with the blinking lights of my phone. The sleepy slowness and the eventual hunkered-down working, the brilliant piled-white beauty and even tomorrow’s brown slush-piles are neither good nor bad, not really. They are here now, and they will change in time. They are facts of life belonging to winter-time; they’re not meant to be compared to other seasons.

More than a few of my friends have said that the word “season” is their least favorite bit of disingenuous Christianese, dripping with the false piety of using a Bible word where a regular phrase will do. I agree with them, in the sense that we’ve overused the word at the expense of the metaphor. Yet in its place, it is a rich and deep and kind reminder that we can neither slow nor speed the turning of the earth.

I have come to admit that I am an impressionable person, easily and even willingly swayed by the moods of people and things around me – including the respective seasons of earth, school, and church years. But culture and personality also manifest a contradictory impulse to resist and overcome the natural swayings of things – to get up early when the sun does not, to work ahead when it’s supposed to be spring break. It leaves me with the feeling I am perpetually behind or failing somehow, a feeling of inferiority I have learned nearly all academics share. What a mad way to live. I wonder now if even my semiannual determination to Figure Out finals and Conquer Anxiety isn’t a little silly; maybe it would serve better to let anxiety have its day, humming along in the background for its bit before summer break’s own sigh of relief.

Those times are coming with their own adrenaline rushes, ecstatic joys and recurring irritations. Today I will be content with this season’s snow-boot challenges and its unparalleled stillnesses. Midafternoon seems like a good time to resume work on a research paper, to begin piling up drifts of words as steadily as the snow falls.

what there is to hold on to

August 19, 2014 by Lyndsey Leave a Comment

I wait at the mall – you have to drop me off before work for a bus that leaves hours later. There is a carousel here whose manic music-box effect betrays the place for the madhouse it is; still I always fight the urge to buy something, anything, in hopes it will dull the pain of watching you go. The little numbing comforts are insidious that way.

This is the deal we’ve made with the long-distance devil, though – two days of travel for two days together. This morning again we’ve handed in rich simplicities – hand-holding, people-watching, picnics – for thin complexities: texts, calls, and the wishing silences, once the day’s been described, that finally undo me.

Our together has been long-distance now for longer than it was not. Some days it surprises me that we are already two years older than when we met; if only because I still so often feel so giddy that he really likes me! But so many other days feel like rocks added to a backpack I’ve shouldered all this time.

Today I just can’t remember or understand why I’m traveling away from you when it feels like an exile, like something is broken, like I will be waiting another three weeks to breathe again. I can’t be practical or make the most of this when everything in this world insists that life is short and love is precious and nothing is guaranteed. With so much pain on this Earth here in August, and so little I can do about any of it, I am not interested in being strong, no matter how small my problems look next to others’. I need your arms around me and your voice in my ear when so little else is right and safe, when I am sure that so little else matters.

I took refuge in the woods yesterday from watching all this pain unfold on my screens. I walked among growing things and was strangely comforted by a passing thought – there have always been war and disease. people have always had to miss one another. there is nothing new under the sun; these are ancient enemies. The world is not ending and we are not forsaken. Today it is the lady I read sometimes and the book your father sent me which remind me that this world is not our home – more, that the God who calls us into our little lives faithfulness is the God who promises fruit like the blackberry miracles you and I picked at dusk. This is all much bigger than my own despair.

One long bus ride later, I walk beside the river Charles, who has been the one saving grace of a lonely city summer. In a few days I will go to see my family and I will pull them close, we will eat outside, I will thank God that we are all alive and together for those days. But now it is only Charles and I, and I lean on a railing and pray and pray like I haven’t been able to do in a while. I pray for you and your own worries. I pray for the lovers in this world separated by more and darker things than just their own choices and ambitions. I pray for my parents and my brother. I pray protection for those working against ebola. I pray that justice will flow like a river in Ferguson and that peace will grow on its banks. I pray for Gaza, Libya, Iraq, and every place where violence holds its demented sway. I pray for this sharply segregated city and for the river and for my church.

Maybe I’m not supposed to care about so many things or pray such long lists, like a child praying for her stuffed animals, but I am a child before all of these things. I am small and helpless and tonight I have only my tears to offer a world ravaged by indifference. I will not shake my head and wish these problems away; I will take them to my Father, who holds them and mourns them and gives us the faith to believe he is working in the lost Saturdays before resurrection.