I feel like Adam and I are taking these great little steps. My writing is inching along in quite beautiful ways*, and Adam is moving in the direction of Industrial/Product Design school. Yup! I am proud and excited. Financing all this will be an adventure, so send your prayers our way, friends. It’s an adventure I’m looking forward to.

Until then, we’ll go on learning to recognize
what we love, and what it takes
to tend what isn’t for our having.
-Li-Young Lee

Amen.

*Let me know if you’d like to help me edit the first 37 pages of my next book. I need all the help I can get.

I lick the juice from my fingers
stained by berries and blood.
The thorn you pulled from my thumb,
you drop to the ground. No one
will find it. It is hidden by tall
grass and men
standing like wheat.

How do you spend your work breaks?

At work, I get a ten minute break. Sometimes I like to sit and take little notes about people around me while I sip on my cappuccino. I feel like Harriet the Spy when I do that. Other times, I journal. Or read. Lately, I’ve taken to memorizing my favourite poems. This is the one I started on today. It is beautiful, and speaks to me in about a thousand ways.

To Hold by Li-Young Lee

So we’re dust. In the meantime, my wife and I
make the bed. Holding opposite edges of the sheet,
we raise it, billowing, then pull it tight,
measuring by eye as it falls into allignment
between us. We tug, fold, tuck. And if I’m lucky,
she’ll remember a recent dream and tell me.

One day, we’ll lie down and not get up.
One day, all we guard will be surrendered.

Until then, we’ll go on learning to recognize
what we love, and what it takes
to tend what isn’t for our having.
So often, fear has led me
to abandon what I know I must relinquish
in time. But for the moment,
I’ll listen to her dream,
and she to mine, our mutual hearing calling
more and more detail into the light
of a joint and fragile keeping.

Your destiny is safe with me.
Your childhood is safe with me.
What you decide to bury is safe with me.

-Li-Young Lee
This has also been a spring of thinking, reading, praying, and crying with people I love. I’ve been learning a lot through it all, though I’m not sure just what, yet.

Two things I am sure of:

I am sure we are always safe with God. Our destiny, our childhood, what we chose to bury, all of it.

I want to be a safe place, too.

(Where do you feel safe?)

When it’s cold and raining,
you are more beautiful.

And the snow brings me
even closer to your lips.

The inner secret, that which was never born,
you are that freshness, and I am with you now.

I can’t explain the goings,
or the comings. You enter suddenly,

and I am nowhere again.
Inside the majesty.

-Rumi

I discovered something unexpected, today. I love Valentine’s Day. Really! I do. The holiday gets such bad a rep these days, like its some commercial thing we have to rise above rather than enjoy. But it’s a very old holiday, actually. And what’s so commercial about love and showing affection?

It was interesting to work at a coffee shop on Valentine’s Day. People react to it in such different ways. Most people are pretty apathetic. One man who daily bikes through all this winter snow bought us all a box of incredible chocolates to thank us for brightening his days. One woman, who was long frusterated with romance, had a love/hate relationship with the holiday. Another lady (who is now one of my favourite customers) told me it was her favourite. She handed me a print-out of the holiday’s history and pulled a handful of fallen rose petals she gathered at work from her pocket. She kept them there so she could smell them all day.

And me? I couldn’t stop smiling and wondering about the love stories of people on the street. I loved how the snow began to fall so sweetly in the afternoon. I loved walking through the sparkley, snowy city after work to meet up with Adam. I loved thinking about how God romances us. I looked up at the dark trees on State Street and thought of a small story that went something like this:

Once upon a time, long, long ago, God created the first human. God looked down on him and loved him so much, that right where the man had stood, the first tree twisted its way through the soil and up into the sky. A year later, a wind blew the tree’s seeds, and another tree grew, and then another. And from that one tree, the world soon was covered with leaves and winding branches.

Adam and I went to a poetry reading by my favourite living poet. It was wonderful, not just because it was Li-Young Lee standing there in front of me, but because Adam came along, even though he didn’t feel well and doesn’t care much for poetry. He’s such an incredible husband.  We rode the bus home together and spent the rest of our Valentine’s Day snuggled together on the couch watching The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and eating salami from the deli bag.

I can hardly think of a more perfect day.

I am a fish.  You are the moon.
You cannot touch me, but your light
can fill the ocean where I live.

-rumi

Epistle -Li-Young Lee

Of wisdom, splendid columns of light
waking sweet foreheads,
I know nothing

but what I’ve glimpsed in my most hopeful of daydreams.
Of a world without end,
amen,

I know nothing,
but what I sang of once with others,
all of us standing in the vaulted room.

But there is wisdom
in the hour in which a boy
sits in his room listening

to the sound of weeping
coming from some other room
of his father’s house,

and that boy was me, and he
listened without understanding, and was soom frightened
by how the monotonous sobs resembled laughter.

All of this while noon became vast day,
while sunlight and the clock
gave birth to melancholy,

before the days grew vacant,
the sun grew terrible, the clock stopped,
and melancholy gave up to greif.

All of this
in a dead hour of a dead day,
among doors closed for nap or prayer.

Who was weeping? Why?
Did the boy fall asleep?
Did he flee the house? Is he there now?

Before it all gets wiped away, let me say,
there is wisdom in the slender hour
which arrives between two shadows.

It is not heavenly and it is not sweet.
It is accompanied by steady human weeping,
and twin furrows between the brows,

but it is what I know,
and so I am able to tell.

My love’s hair is autumn hair, there
the sun ripens.

-Li-Young Lee

To An Isle in the Water, by W.B. Yeats

Shy one, shy one
Shy one of my heart,
She moves in the firelight
Pensively apart

She carries in the dishes
And lays them in a row
To an isle in the water
With her would I go.

She carries in the candles
And lights the curtained room
Shy in the doorway
And shy in the gloom;

And shy as a rabbit
Helpful and shy
To an isle in the water
With her would I fly.

I found myself reading Yeats again last night, when the flat (crowded with crates and boxes) was dark and quiet like the street. I forgot how much I like him and that certain way he says things.

The best part was that I got to read him from my very own desk in an apartment Adam and I had all to ourselves. The best part was that our food (or lack of food) was in the cupboards, and our shampoos were in the shower, and those were our crates crowding the room.

Adam and I moved into our apartment yesterday, and it feels amazing. It’s not anything special, really. Not yet. But it will be. It will be our home, filled with our days and books and treasures. Last autumn, I would always speed home from work, biking and walking as fast and my little toes could go. It wasn’t because I had something to do, I just wanted to be home in that wonderful, dilapidated, house where I knew Monica would be baking apple pie, and Janelle would be doing dishes, and we’d all eat hot cornbread and apples together, and Adam would join us and kiss me.

I haven’t rushed home like that since sometime in April when Janelle moved out. But at work today, I find my toes feeling fidgety. I can’t wait to go home. I can’t WAIT to go HOME! I might just sprint down the street.

It feels so good. It feels so, so good. I think that “home” must be the most amazing place in the entire world. There have been physical places that have moved me, changed me, and knocked me off my feet. There have been physical places so stunning, I learned more from them about God’s beauty and mystery than anything I read in any book. But to have a place right here on earth that you can bind yourself to and be yourself in, a place that is so tied to the people and moments you love- that is miraculous.

What is the most amazing place in the world? Tell me about your home. What do you like about it?