driving the tractor, pulling fence posts, hauling cedar, making dinner.

sometimes life takes strange paths. I never imagined this.

I’m a country girl……….. with patent leather heels, an extreme sensitivity to the beauty of melancholy music and poetry, an affinity for fairy tales and Europe, and a scholarly mind.

but here I am plunging through brush to yank a fence post out of the ground with my gloved hands, using the steps I learned on the dance floor to avoid tangling my feet in barbed wire, kneeling on thorns as I work rusted nails out of wood (and thinking of new analogies), and holding my 4-year old brother on my lap as I drive the tractor along the fence line.

and the funny thing is… I like it. The high heels can wait. I’ll wear them on Sundays. I’ll write poetry and read aloud to my sister in the evenings. I’ll cherish my shelf and memory full of fairy tales and tell myself stories as I lie awake in bed. I’ll save up to go to Europe someday, and I’ll study history and theology and literature when I can.

but watch for me running across the grazing field with pliers in my pocket, stretching electric fence wire from here to kingdom come, buying new leather gloves and work boots, and being able to do more pushups than most girls. (…not necessarily that last one. =P)

it wouldn’t have been my choice, but life isn’t a “Choose-Your-Own-Adventure” book. It’s a fairy tale, full of unexpected tasks, surprising romances, and… mostly just miracles. And the funny thing about miracles? we can’t choose them. They choose us.

Yesterday, I was accosted by my 19th birthday. Amid all the activities, I managed to allow myself some time for reflection, because one shouldn’t simply blow through life without remembering what made life what it is. So, in no particular order, I recalled to memory my preschool years (with bangs and Lamb Chop and playing grocery store in the kitchen and Bambi), my elementary influences (with Jungle Jam and suddenly green eyes and my drama queen t-shirt and patient parents and playing ‘house’ with my cousins at Christmas), middle school turmoil (with choir obsession and fashion realization and The Chronicles of Narnia and questions about Christianity and international student ministries and changing churches), and the combined confusion and clarity of high school (with state-wide singing competitions and The Lord of the Rings and NCFCA and the beauty of sound doctrine and the passions of wonder and love and voracious reading and poetry and discovering what friendship means).

“You know the effort I have given, and You know exactly what it cost. And though my innocence was taken, not everything is lost. (Not everything is lost, no.) You’re the hope in the morning. You’re the light when the night is falling. You’re the song when my heart is singing. It’s Your love! You’re the eyes to the blind man. You’re the feet to the lame man walking. You’re the sound to the people singing. It’s Your love!

Your love is all that I needed. All I ever needed is Your love.” [Brandon Heath]

I sit in the dark, unmoving, and there’s nothing to see, but everything to feel. The wind becomes a symphony, and maybe it’s a lonely voice above my head, or maybe it’s voices together as one, with my voice among them.

I need you to understand that I write because I feel, and I feel so much that it hurts inside, like music caught in my soul. I write to get rid of it, and I write to keep it forever, because words never die. Somehow they make beauty out of uncertainty and passion out of pain, and even my little life starts to look noble.

I write because words are tears and words are laughter; frozen, yet so alive. Words are the miracle I never was.

I need you to understand. I write because… because… because I need you to understand. I need you to recognize the irregular pulse of my soul, and know that beneath the blood that paints its way through my veins, there’s more life than you can see. I don’t know how that life found me here, but it’s making me more than I am, and I write to set it free.

I know you have felt the same way. Maybe you have never felt so at home, and yet so full of longing when you’re capturing emotion with your camera. Or with your paintbrush. Maybe you don’t paint with colours or words, but with raw action and physical exertion. Perhaps you can touch a musical instrument and make it sing the deepest chorus of your heart. There’s something inside you that won’t stay there, and it’s glorious and sad and full of hope and confusion, and you know that it can’t just be yours or you’ll blow into a thousand tiny pieces trying to contain it.

What is it that reveals your soul? What is it that I need to understand about you?

You would love those sprawling cliffs and the deep water below them. When you swim ten feet above the lazy catfish parties, it’s like you’re alone in an aquamarine mystery, and the mystery is more beautiful than the answer. I don’t think there is an answer, and that’s why it’s beautiful. The breeze turns the stillness into contented energy, and little ripples kiss your upper lip again and again like there’s no tomorrow and all we have is now. The past is gone and the future will never come and no one cares. You just swim into the 4 o’clock sun. You see poetry in everything. And for once, you exult in being alone… but then you’re not alone. Because your little sister and your fabulous cousin come and play seals right next to you, and then you exult in being not-alone. And you swim through the ripples to the diving log and pretend it’s a ship. Sometimes you can feel a fresh-water spring under you and it’s so COLD you scream and everyone thinks you saw a snake and then you laugh at them.

Then it’s eleven in the morning on another day and you’re alone again, down by the rope swing without much sunscreen, building a waterfall and channels for three hours. When you’re finished, it’s a quality establishment, and that sunburn on your back? It hardly matters. And your chipped fingernail polish? It doesn’t matter at all.

There’s a big hill from the upper campground to the lower campground, and it’s perfect for riding your bike with no brakes. People talk about throwing precaution to the wind, but I don’t think that’s what happens. I think the wind whooshes around you so fast that it snatches your precaution away from you, whether you’re holding it tightly or not. And I never hold mine tightly on that hill anymore. I’ve been hurtling down it at top speed ever since I was nine years old.

You would love the annual catfish-fry… sitting on rocks with fishing poles all day long, baiting with hot-dogs, naming the fish you catch, and throwing away the “stanleys”. And then at the end of the day, you haul your stringer back up to the cabin and your dad tries to show you how to clean the fish and it’s disgusting but now you’ll be able to survive in the wild. If you had a knife. And matches or flint. And cornmeal and Lowry’s salt and oil to coat the fish with. I fried them this year, and it took forever.

Oh, and then when you feel like it, you can walk up to the office and charge any number of ice-creams to your family’s account.

It was a week of enchantment and detachment. When being alone didn’t ever feel lonely. A week of painted rocks and curious fish and family and hardly any other campers to bring my mind back to the present. I don’t think I took a week off from real life, really. I think I took a week of visiting it. Maybe paradise is what’s really real, and everything else is simply the contrast material.

Scratch the maybe.

Ah, but the contrast material always seems so very contrasting when I come home. When I was a kid, I used to be sad to come home because home wasn’t as fun. But now I’m sad to come home because home is so much less home. It’s so much more complicated. Here is where I have to think about the future and figure out how to deal with the past. Here is where alone always feels lonely. But I tell myself to get a grip and wear a smile, because even while I miss that carefree river, a River of Life is flowing inside of me and I only have to look to the Source to realize that I will never despair and I will never let go. Even when all I want is to fade, there’s colour holding onto me that won’t let me give up. I can’t stay in paradise, but I can carry it with me always. And I will.

And part of me feels pensive and slightly plaintive. But the loss of the above facets of competition is nothing to me, because it’s YOU I care about. You priceless, ridiculously wonderful people. I don’t want to lose you, and I foresee myself going to great lengths in order to avoid that. =) But “whatever way our stories end, I know you have re-written mine by being my friend.”  We seniors are ready to move on, but our readiness is due so much to what we’ve learned from our fellow competitors and comrades.

And I will never forget what you have been to me. “I thank my God every time I remember you.” -Philippians 1:3

More (for everyone I love in the NCFCA)

I remember the beginning
I was a little bit scared.
I was ready for the judges…
But I was so unprepared.

I had been warned you were skillful…
That competition would be tight.
But no one warned me you were wonderful!
I got a shock of delight.

Because you’re so much more than a first-place award.
You’re defined by more than your I.O. boards;
The joy in your eyes is a smile in a thunderstorm.
I felt that spark when I first walked through those doors.
And you’re so much more than a balanced chart.
You’re business-attired works of art.
You scribbled your names on the flowpad of my heart
And I’ll never forget it, even when we’re far apart.

I remember returning
How could I stay away?
We were comrades and allies
And this was our heyday.

We dropped our defenses,
And picked up guitars.
And we whirled through the season,
With songs, words, and linked arms.

And I loved you, ’cause you’re so much more than a first-place award.
You’re defined by more than your I.O. boards;
The joy in your eyes is a smile in a thunderstorm.
I still feel that spark when I walk through those doors.
And you’re so much more than a balanced chart.
You’re business-attired works of art.
You scribbled your names on the flowpad of my heart
And I’ll never forget it, even when we’re far apart.

You’re so much more than I was looking for.
You’re so much more….
Than I could have hoped for.

Now life is so picturesque
Since we’re all here again.
But my time’s almost up–
I’m nearing the end.

Now I’m one of the Seniors.
We almost wish we could stay.
But we are stones full of promise.
And this league is our trebuchet.

Thank you for being so much more than a first-place award.
And defined by more than your I.O. boards;
The joy in your eyes could bring a smile to a thunderstorm.
I still feel that spark as I walk out of those doors.
And you’re so much more than a balanced chart.
You’re business-attired works of art.
You scribbled your names on the flowpad of my heart
And I’ll never forget it, even when we’re far apart.

 And I’ll never forget it, even when we’re far apart.

<3

This video is a commemoration. A reflection on times of revelry and revery. A wistful celebration. And it’s for you. You are NCFCA.

And because I knew you, I have been changed. For the better. For good.

(p.s. I wanted to get everyone in this slideshow. I really tried. Unfortunately, there are people I know I missed. If I’ve talked you you more than 3 times, you really should be in this… so mentally add yourself. This video is for you, too.)

When a mass begins to grow in the corner of your bigger-than-real-life Texas skyline, and mutates into fantastic shapes accented by the setting sun… everyone is at the windows.

“It looks like a marshmallow in the microwave,” I nodded. But apparently some food analogies are superior to others, and Anna defended her popcorn word-picture with enthusiasm before she began to pick out shapes in the gigantic marshmallow/popcorn cloud.
“I see an Indian talking! He has his mouth open like this!” I had forgotten that my sister can open her mouth very wide. But she couldn’t leave it like that, because she was our cloud monitor, keeping track of the changing shapes. She had a couple of assistants in Alan and myself.
“Der’s a cowboy reading a book wid his feet up!” declared Alan, and I’m not sure whether he actually saw this or was making it up. But Anna went along with it.
“Okay, and there’s a lady with a cat leaning on her EYE!”
“Where?” I asked.
“Uhhh… it’s gone now. These things change so FAST!”
“Uh-huh,” I said slowly, my eyes laughing about several different things at once. “Look at that top part– it looks like a caterpillar, with the feet and everything.”
“Yeah, it does!”
“And if you cut it in half and only looked at the left half, it would be a buffalo.”
“Yeah, a charging buffalo! With smoke behind it,” she added. And she was right. It wasn’t hard to imagine the muscled beast rampaging across a rippling American plain– the cloud was growing larger by the second, morphing into new shapes and creating new creativity-conducive poofs. It looked so marvelously alive. It was like watching footage from one of those time lapse cameras… but here we were in real time.

“It all looks like babies!” Alan announced with excitement.
“Haha, you’re just copying Ellie in Up. She saw babies in all the clouds too,” Anna laughed at him before launching into her next description. “That white part over there looks like a waterfall… the part with all the smudgyness.”
“Or like the walls in Carlsbad Caverns…” I thought to myself while she pointed out another cloud sculpture. A few seconds later I heard her say, “The whole cloud looks like it’s evaporating!” And I’m not sure where she got that, but I thought it was funny when Alan tried to imitate the word: “Buddaperading.”
The sun was sneaking off at this point, taking the orange and pink and yellow away from the cloud as it left. Soon the miraculous mutations of the marshmallow/popcorn cloud were almost indistinguishable. And I don’t believe we’ll even get any rain from our evening art exhibition, because it was following a northern trajectory. But it was enough to have seen and wondered.

“He causes the clouds to rise over the earth.” -Jeremiah 10:13

The trees in my yard are not noble. Sometimes I sit staring at them, noticing how much they could use a good rain, and I wonder if they envy their distant cousins, varieties of maple, beech, or pine, and wish they could wear such blooming veils of leaves, and tickle their neighbors with branches sheathed in such sturdy and supple bark. The trees in my yard are like the people in my town– rugged, hardy, and familiar with drought. They don’t flaunt their elegance, since it can’t be found in the blunt organization of their boughs. They weather the world with a matter-of-fact grimness, like maiden aunts who know their bridal day will never come. But sometimes, when a storm knocks at the horizon and the wind sweeps through like an upstairs maid shaking out the rugs, I catch the trees in my yard laughing to each other, as if to say, “Life is one enormous practical joke, and isn’t our part in it supreme?”

…

This is not called writer’s block.

…

It’s honestly not that enigmatic ailment that strikes terror into the hearts of NaNoWriMo participants. You’re writing. But nothing is poignant, no memories or hidden truths or profound one-liners strike the gong of your heart and vibrate out the ends of your fingers and onto the page. You try to explain why Valentine’s Day makes you want to celebrate, even though you’re single. Why ‘single’ doesn’t equal ‘alone’. You tell stories about people you love. But something is missing; the very love you feel– the love that you’re endeavoring to siphon into your words.

So when your dad calls you to help him move a desk out to the storage building, you relinquish the computer to your young sister who begins to watch all the animated Hallmark Valentine’s Day cards.

You pull your cowboy boots over your heart-patterned socks and load the desk onto the truck. The air smells deep and wide in the country when it’s winter time. Much deeper and wider than your thoughts, not to mention your words. You know you won’t be publishing those you wrote earlier. Maybe someday you’ll reach into a previously-undiscovered pocket and pull out the phrases you were looking for. Perhaps then you’ll paste them on a blank-paper canvas and admire them for hours and guard them from graphite or ink smudges. But for now, you listen to Owl City sing ‘If My Heart Was a House’ and borrow a bit of the genius of others.

“There’s a lot of love out there, man.” -Filmore (CARS)

What fun we have, my words and I.

I confess I play favorites. I try not to show it, but my favorite words may tend to roll into life, off my tongue or my pen, slightly more often than others. I’m especially susceptible to this trend when I’m taking notes. My debate flow-sheets know this. It’s just the truth that debate rounds improve when I let my pen and my mind trace the composition of words like ‘audacity’ or ‘suspenseful’ or ‘symbolism’.

I feel sorry for words like ‘binge’. There’s nothing in the word ‘binge’ that hints of its extravagant meaning. ‘Extravagant’. That’s an impressive word entity.

But even though the worthy English language possesses some words that stick tight to my heart and appeal to my imagination, and some that don’t, I treasure them all inside the cabinets and baskets of my mind. Sometimes I wash my hands and plunge them deep into those stored-up words, provoked to laughter because of ‘rambunctious’ and ‘chasm’ and ‘lilting’, and their lovely, pronounced tonal quality. Then I gather armfuls of less euphoric and euphonic words to add to the conglomeration, and I swirl them around like an over-cautious cook, waiting to savor the summer glory of my creation. And although the sight and sound of noble, passionate words can make me smile… only the meticulous and magical rapport between them and a hand-picked collection of their lesser counterparts can make me cry.

Words are the flames under my heart, and my heart boils over.

(If I was Winnie the Pooh, would you be my Piglet and hold my hand?
Would you spell all my difficult words, like Owl?
Would you Tigger-bounce some wide-eyed wonder into me?
Would you be my Christopher Robin and always make wrong things come right?)

“I don’t see much sense in that,” said Rabbit. “No,” said Pooh humbly, “there isn’t. But there was going to be when I began it. It’s just that something happened to it along the way.”

“If you want to make a song more hummy, add a few tiddely poms.”

“Poetry and Hums aren’t things which you get, they’re things which get you. And all you can do is to go where they can find you.”

“Some people care too much, I think it’s called love.”

“You can’t help respecting anybody who can spell TUESDAY, even if he doesn’t spell it right; but spelling isn’t everything. There are days when spelling Tuesday simply doesn’t count.”

“How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.”

“It’s snowing still,” said Eeyore gloomily.
“So it is”
“And freezing”
“Is it?”
Yes,” said Eeyore. “However,” he said, brightening up a little, “we haven’t had an earthquake lately.”

“Oh Tigger, where are your manners?”
“I don’t know, but I bet they’re having more fun than I am.”

“Hallo, Rabbit,” he said, “is that you?”
“Let’s pretend it isn’t,” said Rabbit, “and see what happens.”

“If the person you are talking to doesn’t appear to be listening, be patient. It may simply be that he has a small piece of fluff in his ear.”

“They’re funny things, Accidents. You never have them till you’re having them.”

“Well,” said Pooh, “what I like best — ” and then he had to stop and think. Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn’t know what it was called.”

“Piglet took Pooh’s arm, in case Pooh was frightened.”

“If you live to be 100, I hope I live to be 100 minus 1 day, so I never have to live without you.”