a new year.

I love this newly picked, garden-fresh, crisp, unwilted, raw, natural new year already. I only have a pair of considerations for 2011. Two of the biggest things that I complain about not having/taking/making enough time for are the Bible and exercise. Ultimately, knowing the Lord is not solely about reading your Bible everyday - yes, one understands His heart and passions better by reading about Him, but knowing God also includes conversing with Him, worshiping, and just resting in Him. But it can't be all these things and none of the other. So with this blank canvas of a new year, I desire to be with Him everyday (in all arenas, but especially Bible-reading) and also to incorporate the classic push toward healthier living: exercise 3+ times a week (Gwen is signed up with me for this one).

This break has just made me feel so fresh. Even working at The Gap has been easy and enjoyable. mornings and evenings have been especially special. I usually get up late, have some coffee, watch the news, and then exercise at the Y with Jojo or Lifetime with Mom. In the evening, the whole family gathers downstairs with blankets and pizza or tea, and we watch an episode or two of Planet Earth. We love nature shows...anything from BBC or Channel 2.

It's late now, and I can hear our dog, Addie, breathing outside my door. Hearing her sleepy, rhythmic inhale and exhale is making me tired. Getting up early tomorrow to go to a core conditioning class with Amy and then out to Pazzaluna's and Swede Hollow to celebrate her 21st birthday, so I am off to bed.

Peace.

Lo

keep the dream alive

Thinking of moving here.

dear friends, if you feel that i have fallen off the face of the earth...

...it is because i have. The dark world of LIT 3125 and the others, complete with their various four-credit work loads, have pulled me away from life and writing as I used to know it. Not writing makes me feel like I'm shriveling up inside, though. I don't like feeling like a dead plant. So in the name of renewal, here is a list of things I am thinking about this winter and looking forward to in the next several months: boundary water camping garrison keillor's writer's almanac on mpr time to read and therefore write (since reading often leads to writing) elsie's home in wentworth understanding what the feast of the booths was all about in nehemiah seattle and the northern beaches amy's cabin annual sledding at battle creek with jo and liz zumba and cycling channel 2 with the fam finishing my quilt walker art museum with celinda i always get to a point in the summer where i wish it was christmas and a point in the winter where i wish it was summer. december 26th and i already want hot indian summer. - by the way, don't get too lazy to get in your car and run errands in the winter. sometimes i am like this. sometimes i just hate getting out of the car and walking into a store and then walking back outside and getting back in the car. don't be like this. even though it's cold. back to the list - reading all of bleak house by charles dickens gaining more wisdom about what peace in Christ looks like returning my weighted exercise ball for one that doesn't have sand in the bottom finding the ring and pin that i lost (i know they're in the car, it's just a matter of squeezing my hand farther into the cracks than a hand should really go) and coming up with a good new years resolution.

Finally, here is a song to cheer you up in case the winter is long and hard. It's full of clay men with beards and flannel:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrQRS40OKNE&w=425&h=349]

mud slush.

Everything is flying away away away away away.

lauren

...misses writing.

breathing space.

One thing I love about my friend Elsie is that every time we pray together, before we begin, she pauses for a long while. I always picture her dialing the Lord's telephone and waiting...waiting... until He answers. During those small seconds, I breathe. And I feel Him filling the room.

I know I don't need a dial tone to hear Him or tell him things; I can just think and He knows. But I like the coming, the consciousness. Willful. Studied.

Fools.

The locale of forests changes with each window,one eyelid shut signifies a deadness of character.

I wonder what it feels like to be curled up in that eggshell, anywhere but here. We always sleep and then suffer splinters from wooden sills.

Collecting debris-filled nights to throw out with the garbage has become a full-grown habit; or rather, we've always piled them in heaps outside the window.

This laying in the dirt never really helped you see the lighthouse in the shrubbery. The curtain creases are still sewn shut.

The space between the sheets could not grow wider if you yelled at me. (You saw what I did through the shutters).

We can never rest in this train of a bed that sinks through the floor; superimposed on the temporal lobe are the trees I stamp out in brain shapes.

The roar of the iron mine can still be heard from the bottom of the mattress. Apertures in the wall show strings we untied from branches.

Victims of unraveling quilts and alliances rarely make it these days. The frozen glass panes are cracking from the inside.

© Lauren Bernhagen 2010

when geese attack.

Been learning that margin is very important in life. Like if you get done with class at 3:00pm, and you have a meeting at 3:15pm, but there's a ten minute walk in between...I mean, what if something happens in those five spare minutes? Like what if you get stopped at the corner crossing Snelling for about three rounds of stoplight changes? And what if some geese start crossing the road and everything stops for even longer? And then what if one of those geese starts glaring, weaving, and bobbing it's head in your direction while you stand by yourself on a crosswalk square, and all the drivers in their stopped cars just stare as you walk in a wide arc way off the crosswalk into the middle of the intersection to deliberately avoid the bird pooping on the fifth rectangle? Anyways, in the words of my RD: "Margin is like toilet paper. You don't just use one piece, because what if you make a mistake?"

No, You Must Still Sit in Gardens

It's always a daunting thing to be gluedto the roads that we walked. You can make your hands mark the street lines for four hundred paces, explaining. Rehearse that road with me, I say from behind this lovely, rusted patina. Mesh your hands with the yellow paint. Explicate, recollect. We children often bury cars and trains in this deep earth but are never found in mounds ourselves. Except for these days. In this interval, the pines still turn. In this interval, the cracked wheat of your fingers is sifting through the picture box, each armoire and empty dollhouse, the swing bellies and tire treads. In this interval, the houseboats, low in the bloated green water, are still leaving port. These portraits of where we stood are delicate.

This is not how your tired arms wanted to rest, cleaning your own spilled milk in the street and eating with only one lamp on. My tiny name, still written in the dust on the coffee table, neighbor to the house fern, will remain in your mind as the houseboats, stationary and moving - - silt and tokens in your mourning robe pocket, preserving and preserving my return to the root of it all.

© Lauren Bernhagen 2010

i place my hand on this drift.

This scene is what it is: acquainted. I rest like old rusty coins at the bottom of that lake.

Burrowed into the bottom of a mechanic's jacket,

but that's not who gave it to me

(this is not a love story).

It's novel and fitting like our professor's leather suitcase

but with the latch unbuckled and flapping as he walks.

I could lay on the back of the couch this afternoon,

feel the back vertebral column synchronize my spine

and be still.

Yesterday, when I sat stroking the skeleton of a fan,

I remembered the pearl cufflink I found on the windowsill,

rare like an owl feather.

O keep us from the flash of the world.

Unbend, unbend, and hinge;

This pleads raw and organic and unconcealed.

a lone bulb wrung from a power line,

shattered under the weight.

But the shards have a pulse.

They're beating on the ground.

© Lauren Bernhagen 2010

keeping the clock wound.

Lewis Carroll (Alice in Wonderland) was a storyteller, an artist, as well as a mathematician, and artists often have a more profound sense of what time is all about than do the scientists. There's a story of a small village (about the size of the village near Crosswicks) where lived an old clockmaker and repairer. When anything was wrong with any of the clocks or watches in the village, he was able to fix them, to get them working properly again. When he died, leaving no children and no apprentice, there was no one left in the village who could fix clocks. Soon various clocks and watches began to break down. Those which continued to run often lost or gained time, so they were of little use. a clock might strike midnight at three in the afternoon. So many of the villagers abandoned their timepieces.One day a renowned clockmaker and repairer came through the village, and the people crowded around him and begged him to fix their broken clocks and watches. He spent many hours looking at all the faulty timepieces, and at last he announced that he could repair only those whose owners had kept them wound, because they were the only ones which would be able to remember how to keep time. So we must daily keep things wound: that is, we must pray when prayer seems dry as dust; we must write when we are physically tired, when our hearts are heavy, when our bodies are in pain.

We may not always be able to make our "clock" run correctly, but at least we can keep it wound so that it will not forget.

- Madeleine L'Engle

repose.

My presence will go with you, and I will give you rest. Exodus 33:14

the lift away.

So I enrolled in this poetry class for fall semester. First day of class, I knew I'd come home: the professor had little pictures of aesthetically pleasing birds and plants and lanterns all over the syllabus for no reason at all. And she attempted a one-word-per-slide Powerpoint, but then explained to the class that she wasn't very technologically advanced and didn't care much for Powerpoints anyways (we had only gotten through one slide when this came up). Perfect, right?It's so wonderful, but I'm quickly seeing that this class is bringing me places I did not plan on going and unlocking little safe parts that I didn't plan on unlocking. I thought it would be fairly simple - go to class, read some poems, go to my dorm, write some poems. I would insert some clever and witty diction every so often, and that would be that. But really, things have been coming out that I didn't even know existed down there in the bottom of my mind. I'm loving it and hating it as it's surfacing things that I need to deal with and be honest with myself about, but it's completely engrossing at the same time. I'm discovering a really hardened and compact place that needs to be broken, and that hurts. Instead of picking away at the pebble chips on the surface, this class (or more directly, the Lord) has handed me a sledgehammer. I know there will be all sorts of grace and redemption and loving from His side so I can only assume this unsettling and ruffling of my spirit is natural. Why would I need grace-love if that perfectly sinful part of me wasn't blasting to the surface, per usual? I think my spiritual poverty is turning from black/white to color very quickly. Needless to say, I'm still a bit insecure about what these poems look like, but if anything, it's started the blog-flow again. Have missed this a little.

they're here, they're here. toot toot!

I haven't really had much time to blog lately, so hopefully you will be satisfied with my short little blurbs. I just wanted to say that my freshman arrived yesterday, and I could not love them more. P.S. Blog post #100 - does this make me an official blogger?

i love my apartment.

It's still part of the dorms BUT, we now have a dishwasher. and pretty, white slatted closet doors. God is so good to me. Also, I am thankful for roommates who love Jesus passionately. And: they both love tea.

These are the beginnings.

esther.

Isaiah 61:1-2, 8-9

The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me,
because the Lord has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor,
he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim liberty to the captives,
and the opening of the prison to those who are bound;

to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor,
and the day of vengeance of our God;
to comfort all who mourn;

For I the LORD love justice;
I hate robbery and wrong;
I will faithfully give them their recompense,
and I will make an everlasting covenant with them

Their offspring shall be known among the nations,
and their descendants in teh midst of the peoples;
all who see them shall acknowledge them,
that they are an offspring the Lord has blessed.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMwVXlWfK4M&w=227&h=170]

zombies.

So you may or may not be interested to know that I had a dream closely resembling I Am Legend last night. I've decided that I have the weirdest dreams, and they have gotten so ornate when it comes to plot and content that I need to start writing them down. This one was only slightly spooky.

So basically, it was winter out...one of those nights when the snow was blowing in sheets across the street, and somehow, in the back of my mind, I knew that everyone in the city was turning into a zombie (sometimes you just know). I was with Paul, and we were hurriedly driving to my house to get some of my belongings before even my family turned. It was pretty black out...only the snow and streetlights where white. Very monochromatic. Anyway, we arrived, and I remember dumping the contents of my bathroom drawer into my bag and haphazardly grabbing clothes out of my room - I didn't have much time. I saw my mom on the way out and knew just by looking at her that it was almost too late.

We then drove as fast as we could out of town far out into the country (as that would be the safest, clearly.) We stopped at a wooden, shanty-like bed and breakfast? to sleep, and something seemed fishy there too. There were green cornfields all around, and it was dusky outside, quite pretty - but inside, the building had exposed pipes, boring walls, and beige carpet. I had my own room and was about to get ready for bed when a couple random people wandered in all friendly-like. They seemed normal, but I knew they weren't (insert dramatic music here). I ran into the bathroom and dialed Paul's phone to call for help. He answered right away and said he was coming.

And then I woke up. because there were tornado sirens outside, on a Thursday, at 10am, in perfectly sunny & blue sky weather.

Huh.

washington. oregon. northern cali.

Can I just express some of my excitement over the West Coast road trip that is occurring next summer? This means camping, northern beaches, the woods, mountains, and Seattle all at once. I am beside myself.

Books.

I love having time to read. And this summer I have done just that. Here's my list: 1. When People Are Big and God is Small - finished 2. Alice I Have Been - currently reading 3. The Sacred Romance - currently reading  4. Practical Theology for Women  5. These Strange Ashes 6. Half Broke Horses

Would love further recommendations if you have some...

make war.

I hear so many Christians murmuring, murmuring about their imperfections, and their failures, and their addiction, and their shortcomings. And I see so little war! Murmur, murmur, murmur...Why am I this way? Make war! 

Until you believe that life is war - that the stakes are your soul - you will probably just play at Christianity with no bloodearnestness and no vigilance and no passion and no wartime mindset. If that is where you are this morning, your position is very precarious. The enemy has lulled you into sleep or into a peacetime mentality, as if nothing serious is at stake. And God, in his mercy, has you here this morning, and had this sermon appointed to wake you up, and put you on a wartime footing.
- John Piper

The only possible attitude toward out-of-control desire is a declaration of all-out war. There is something about war that sharpens the senses. You hear a twig snap or the rustling of leaves and you are in attack mode. Someone coughs and you are ready to pull the trigger. Even after days of little or no sleep, war keeps us vigilant. - Ed Welch

Stop making peace with ears and eyes and tongues and hands and feet that betray you like Judas.