I normally feel like I don't have a lot of time to cook during the school year. However, something has come over me in the last week, and I've been baking and sautéing up a storm. Here are pictures of a few of the goods.
Happy Fall cooking.
Hearts/Brains
Everyone has emotions. Everyone has logic. I want to begin by saying that. However, the way people employ these elements and to what degree reveals a lot about their person. They each have strengths and weaknesses which is why they work well together when they function simultaneously.
As I sit here at the table, eating a cream cheese wonton, I mull this over. I think it is interesting that emotion is always equated with the heart, and logic with the brain. I think it's all a bit more interconnected than that.
Some logical, biblical musings about logic: Logic is everywhere in the Bible. In Mark 2:10-11, Jesus explains
as he heals a man, "But that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins”—he said to the paralytic— “I say to you, rise, pick up your bed, and go home." He also says in Acts 2:36 as he gives graspable evidence, "Let all the house of Israel therefore know for certain that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified.” Citizens of various cities, Roman officials, even the disciples constantly ask for evidence that Jesus is God. And Jesus constantly provides proof through His miracles that He is.
The Bible also has a lot to say about feelings. It's refreshing to know that not only do we have a God who acknowledges the necessity of fact and knowledge, but we also have a God who experiences deep emotion. The actual word emotion isn't mentioned in the Bible, but the words anger, joy, grief, terror, peace, and a host of others are mentioned hundreds of times. The Lord cares about our emotions; in Psalm 34:18, it says that God is close to the brokenhearted. King David expresses roller coaster emotions throughout the Psalms, and he is known as a man after God's own heart. Jesus weeps, sweats blood, dies for the world because of His great love. More emotions: Exodus 4:14 and in 1 Chronicles 29:17.
God gives us multiple warnings for both emotion (Proverbs 15:18; Philippians 4:6) and logic (Colossians 2:8; 2 Corinthians 10:5). Both of these are gifts, but as with anything beautiful and good, if twisted in the wrong way, each can become destructive. I am becoming more and more aware of this in my own life, and I have friends that lean toward both sides of the spectrum in how they approach life as well. Naturally, I slant more towards making decisions based off of my feelings. As a fantastic contrast, quite a few of my friends make decisions based off of facts and rationality.
I've discovered that if I make hasty decisions based on my fleeting emotions, I often come across as directionless, unbridled, and foolish. Mainly, because I am probably being directionless, unbridled, and foolish. If I depend solely on my fleeting feelings, I may end up making rash choices, thinking irrational thoughts, or simply become swallowed up in a sea of sadness, passion, etc. However, while these things could happen if I'm not paying close attention, I wouldn't give up my inclination toward feeling things strongly for anything. My emotions help me work through things in my life. Just as the nerves in fingers alert an individual to pain as a protection if he or she touches a hot stove, negative emotions can help alert you of the state of your soul. Not only that, but they help me to sense what others are going through and understand, they help me sympathize and rejoice.
At the same time, I admire those with the ability to look at a situation, strip it to facts and logic, and move forward with practical assurance. While those with a bent toward thinking things out may occasionally come across as harsh or blunt, if wary of this, their pragmatism is a gold mine and incredibly helpful in situations where feelings could get in the way.
I am so grateful for these people in my life: my friends that feel my emotions with me, and my friends that help me work through situations rationally.
Whatever your bent is - feeling or logic - own it. You've been given a great gift. Don't wish away the fact that you cry in movies or that you go straight and bluntly to the point in sticky circumstances. You bless others with how you function; allow them to bless you too.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-A_OJ-ccZug&w=420&h=315]
This has nothing to do with anything, but I've been obsessed with this song lately.
Suave Partings.
Well, a chapter of my life is over. Today was my last day at MPR and my last day at Redleaf Press. I was surprisingly more emotionally involved with the ending of both than I had first expected. It made me think a lot about goodbyes and how they are never truly a smooth and polished thing. They can be awkward or painful. Sometimes you are only saying goodbye to someone temporarily and sometimes you are saying goodbye forever. In America, if we are close, we hug, maybe kiss, clasp hands, grab shoulders and say intent words. The eyes dart and the heart sinks and climbs. All actions laced with the faintest tint or heaviest weight of grief. There is also a strangeness to saying goodbye to people you don't know very well. Will they just meld back into the crowds that make up the public earth once again? I guess. I still remember a lot of the co-workers I spent hours working with in high school, friends from group projects in college classes, translators from mission trips. I think of them here and there, they live in my mind, I hope they are well. Have you ever had a truly charming parting with someone you weren't going to see for a long time or possibly never again? I would like to hear your story.
In all the sadness and unusualness of the goodbye, the unfamiliarity of it--even though it would seem we would be most familiar with it all with all the goodbyes that happen in life--there is still something most beautiful about it. Something in the shadow of the goodbye. I like this quote by Mary Jaksch:
Antiquated goodbye formulations, such as ‘fare-well’, or the even older, ‘fare thee well’ reveal that at the heart, goodbyes are blessings. We bless the other person’s going and coming, wishing that they may be well while away.
That is why we say good-bye. It is a ritual of sorts. We want it to be marvelous, we bless them. We want to say in all other words, You are valued because you are a person. May it go well with you. May your life be a richly beautiful thing. This is how I want to look at partings from now on. Partings from people, things, and seasons. Saying goodbye to nonhuman objects (i.e. your house) or periods of time (i.e. graduating from college) may not be as intimate as a hard goodbye with a person, but they can still be very personal and difficult in a different way. I believe the same attitude can be taken up with this kind of bon voyage too. It is a bold and excellent thing to begin and end and then begin again. It is how life inside is grown and what reaping and sowing are made up of.
I haven't ever hated goodbyes, but I've never particularly loved them either. They are always tinged with a slight anxiety or an urgency of sorts, even when it is simply a so-long to an interval of life, a beloved book, or a place of residence. I am processing how to do them better, how to think of them well, how to have a peaceful temperament toward the whole practice.
I think I've posted this before, but this is a quote dear to my heart.
Let this goodbye of ours, this last goodbye, Be still and splendid like a forest tree... Let there be one grand look within our eyes Built of the wonderment of the past years, Too vast a thing of beauty to be lost In quivering lips and burning floods of tears.
Alice Meynell
Anthem.
Always scattering. Glad He finds and firms and gathers. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJDly8Fe8W8&w=560&h=315]
A Rather Nice Saturday Morning.
I go to the library frequently. I often check the shelves where they keep all the books that have been put on hold to see if any of my requested items have arrived. It is always an exciting couple of seconds - that short walk to the shelves. This morning was no different. I woke up at the sunny hour of 8:45am which is unusual for me in general and even more unusual on a Saturday. I am like a small babe in that I need 9 to 10 hours of sleep to feel completely rested. With all of my extra morning time, I decided to get ready early and run a few errands. Tiptoeing out to the living room, I turned the air conditioner down from the blasting state that we keep it at during the night due to the poor ventilation in our apartment. After that, I quietly closed Linden's door so she would not hear me clattering around in the bathroom and running water. This is also to prevent the sound of the Keurig coffee maker in the kitchen from being heard, as one could mistake it for a motorcycle in the living room or a small jet plane overhead. After I showered and unpacked some clothes from a duffle bag (from a recent trip to Michigan's UP), I grabbed my wallet, two checks I had to deposit, and a smattering of library books I needed to return.
These checks were $8 each and were going to be a bit of a lifeline for the next week. Bills had just been paid, so my bank account was dwindling toward low. As I was pulling out of the parking lot, I was talking with God and told him, "Well, going to trust you to provide this week. Not sure how I'm going to afford gas to get to downtown St. Paul and back three times." After that, I drove casually to the bank where a Wells Fargo ATM was waiting to take those checks off my hands.
Drew and I are always amazed at the robot-like qualities these new ATMs have. You just slide your checks or cash through a little slot, it scans them, asks you to confirm the amount, and then deposits them instantly! It's really just a thrill. After I deposited the money, I selected the button that said 'View Balance' to see if the $16 had actually made it in. However, there was a whopping $55 in my account. This was strange. I was confused and figured the ATM might have made a mistake as there was no way I had that much in my checking, so I shrugged it off until I got home. When I pulled up my statement online, there was the money, completely unexplained, sitting in my checking account. Just enough for gas for the week. Can I just say,
THE LORD PROVIDES FOR ME.
Let's just pause for a moment and take in the fact that this happened for real.
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Okay, we're back.
After visiting the ATM, I went to the library and returned my books. This is always a satisfying feeling and a bit of a weight lifted as I fear the fines added to my account for overdue items and voicemails left from the automated android woman. I then went to check the Holds section (which is always a treat as I said before), but unfortunately there was nothing waiting for me. A real shame. Sometimes when I don't know what to read, I walk through the other shelves and look at what other people have put on hold. I figure that if they took all the time to request it, it must be a story worth reading. Something recommended to them or an author that they love. I've found many a great book doing this.
Well, that's all I have for you. It really was a nice Saturday morning. I hope yours was the same.
A Collection
I’ve been rolling up the ink- stain tears that you left thrown everywhere – on the trees, the tea scraps, my palm.
I will save them for the day when you can open the cupboards to let some air in and recognize my face.
© Lauren Bernhagen 2012
Laundering
Ten minutes ago, I was standing in the small room that juts out into a tiny corridor on one side of our apartment pod. The buildings are each shaped like a sphere or hexagon of sorts, and the small passage on the side is where the laundry machines are. I have had many clothes piling up in my hamper for days now.
There was a nice breeze coming in the window as I dripped blue detergent into the machine. It's been blazing hot outside for about a month now - I think we're all finally getting acclimated. When I was in Honduras the summer before graduating high school and then in Panama the summer between sophomore and junior year of college, I remember wondering how the Central Americans could wear jeans and zip up sweatshirts when I had sweat dripping down my back in a T-shirt and basketball shorts sticking to my thighs.
The breeze in the laundry room, however, was cool and gave way to rain as I shook out a pair of pants and rubbed Resolve on a coffee stain. It was peaceful in the little room, white light from the grey sky and the leaves rustling in the wind. I wandered around, dropping the light colors in together. It smelled like dryer sheets, but not overwhelmingly so. It was quiet. It felt like a room filled with grace and favor.
The presence of God, near.
Here is a truth I've known but haven't freely believed until last week: My Father will never leave.
Do I really believe that? I think one of the most common reasons people stray from the Lord is because they don't think they're worth it. They think they're too sinful, too shameful, too messy to continue following Christ. In a way, they reject themselves for Jesus before even giving Him a chance.
You know that voice of accusation in your head? That "You...you...you..." voice?
"You know, grace is going to run out soon if you keep doing this."
"You're too far gone."
"You're fat."
"If they knew what you really did, they would leave you."
"You don't really have friends."
None of those are Jesus. All of those are Satan. The devil is a coward, so he has to slink around, masking himself as the truth. It's no wonder John 8:44 says there is no truth in the devil - that he is a liar and the father of lies.
This is why we need the Holy Spirit and other believers. The devil wants to pull you out of the crowd, split you up from your community. If he can separate you from the herd, so to speak, he has a much better chance of making you believe his lies and attacking you in the worst way. We need gospel friends who are willing to lovingly remind us of the truth or slap us up a bit and say "Wake up!" This only happens, though, if we are consistently pursuing community and responding when community pursues us.
It's really hard to let walls down. It's really terrifying to be completely real and reveal your sin and thought life to another human being. But it is also beautiful when it happens. Suddenly, darkness has to flee because there is light. The devil can't handle that kind of truth. It is a bold move to verbally tell someone what's really going on in you're life, but it's also what Christ calls us to (James 5:16, Proverbs 28:13). We all have scars, and He gives strength to speak about them to those who ask Him for it.
And, there is the truth that we can cling to above all:
As a believer, there is nothing you can do to separate yourself from the deep, deep well of grace and affection that Jesus is. He is fiercely jealous of your affections. You are continually sought after by Him. You can feel safe, now.
In the laundry room, as I am waiting for the washer to stop spinning, I press my nose against the screen of the window and the mist from the rain is cold on my face. This, I know:
His love won't stop. He will always come for me. He'll never leave.
So I will finish washing my clothes now and rest in all of this. I am joyful. God is here, even now. Don't give into lies about your identity and worth. You are thoroughly accepted and deeply loved. Press on.
While Camping
Blog from a few days ago while I was in Whitewater State Park.
The sun is on the brink of setting. All the people in their campground sites are just starting fires now, the smoke drifting up and over the trees. The woods smell fresh, after rain, and there are several crickets or frogs chorusing together from the bushes. My dad is sitting under the awning outside the camper in a fold-up chair, shaving. My mom is reading in the hammock, one leg swinging out, back and forth, for momentum. We’re about to start dinner.
We slept a nine-hour night last night and then biked and hiked and napped all day long today. Mom brought bags of GORP on the trails this afternoon and we pretty much ate the trip's supply. Food tastes doubly better camping—classic beans and potatoes and meat. After all that, we went in the creek to cool off, and now swimsuits and towels and shorts are hanging all over the ceiling on hooks and other things. It smells like the river and the forest in here. There are grapes in front of me on the table, and I am eating one or two occasionally.
It’s nice to get outside of the normal routine of internship days and work nights, switch around the patterns in my brain a bit. Helps to make me moldable and not set in stone, I think. I get so used to my freeway commute to downtown St. Paul, rush hour, my cubicle, getting up and going to the bathroom three or four different times while I am in my cubicle (so my lower half does not fall asleep), and the various other office-like things that come along with the job. Sometimes all the sameness makes my brain feel like oatmeal.
In addition, I'm not sure what's coming next. What a mystery this graduating-from-college thing is. I feel like I was fairly warned about all the change, but somehow, it's still taking my feet out from under me.
Knowing what is ahead all the time, however, and being in control is a) not how God wants us to live and b) pretty impossible anyways. While this season of my life is transitional, there is one thing that I can feel secure in:
Where I am right now is exactly where God wants me.
This means that there is no where else I could be, physically, emotionally, or otherwise that would bring me more joy and peace than where I am right now. This is a reality for all believers.
It's kind of like this. When I go on a vacation, I often don’t feel like I am resting. Once, I went camping a few days after the end of an extremely busy semester of school and a horrible week of finals. I think it was after my sophomore year. Standing next to the tented wall by the stove on the second day, I started crying because I didn’t know what to do with myself. I was so used to all the stress and pressure that, even in a beautiful place with an open-ended schedule, I felt overwhelmed with the idea of uncontrolled time and had a meltdown. I felt tired the rest of the trip and a bit unsure about how to live without the compression of grades and papers. It wasn’t until I got back home after a week of outdoors that I realized how rested I actually was. My heart felt light. Without even knowing it, something had healed up inside of me, strangely and with time. It was a refreshing peace that I suddenly had, but the process of getting there felt foreign and questionable.
It’s the same way with interim seasons of life. You cannot possibly know how you are changing or why you are being sculpted the way that you are, but just the same, you are being reshaped. It is a beautiful thing. Now the peace comes when you stop struggling against the Sculptor and let yourself whirl around on the spinning wheel instead of trying to stop the wheel or climb onto someone else's wheel or run the wheel yourself or stop the whole operation altogether. Relax. The Lord will take you the direction you need to go. I am finding great delight in this truth.
Mom is clattering some pots together, starting dinner now, and I can see our friends in the campsite next door setting fruit out on their checkered tablecloth. Off to roast sweet potatoes over the fire!
Cheers, Lo
Indian Winter.
My heart beats in a circle,
and I wait for the drum of
grey in my chest cavity to hush
and see.
This is how we live our days, charging everything into light sockets while the bread turns black and the window sky outside dampens into a cold husk.
I don’t want this to be about the winter or how my soul is all of me, how I just can’t catch it yet. This is how the blue hue, seeping from an outside sun, leaks.
Bodies were made to step along, like the sheerness of water and light. Where the air warms and nightbirds sing.
© Lauren Bernhagen 2012
Photo by: Kike Besada
100°F out.
In honor of the breathing-through-a-wet-towel-like heat outside today, here is a summer playlist.
1. Arctic Rhino - Bomba de Luz (this band is still in highschool) 2. Dance to Another Tune - First Aid Kit 3. To a Poet - First Aid Kit 4. Early In the Morning, I'll Come Calling - James Vincent McMorrow 5. We Move Lightly - Dustin O'Halloran 6. The Wave - Miike Snow 7. To the Desert - Branches 8. Going Home - Branches 9. Sun and Moon - Branches (What would the sun and moon say to each other if they fell in love?) 10. Ho Hey - The Lumineers 11. Wandering Star - Policia 12. Slip Away - Josh Garrels 13. Animal Tracks - Mountain Man 14. Father Hear the Prayer We Offer - Page CXVI
Also, here are some books to read if you've never read them. I've just now gotten over the I'm not reading anything because school's over and I don't have to naa naa naa naaaa hump. If you're where I was at, bewildered and shocked, still plastered with all the writing and books you've had to take in via homework in the last nine months, you're probably just now coming around the bend. If you're currently dazed and wondering what to read, here are some options. These five have changed how I look at the world in little pieces and bits.
1. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith 2. Victory Over the Darkness by Neil T. Anderson 3. The Boys of My Youth by Jo Ann Beard 4. The Essential Rumi by Rumi 5. Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis
Sometimes the Things I Want to Say Get Stuck in My Fingers.
I thought it would be fair for me to acknowledge my one-month absence from this blog. One of two things happens regarding writing when I have a lot of emotion happening at once. I either write everything down to get it all out (sometimes blogging twice a day or writing five pages in the book I keep in my bag does the trick). Or, I don't write anything at all, and it all gets wedged deep down in me in great slabs of unknownness. Started and ended lots of things in my life this last month; that was part of it. I can't tell you how many times I began a blog, wrote a few sentences, and then trashed it to my drafts. It doesn't feel natural nor healthy to not be keeping track, though; so, enough with that.
On another note, I've been reading a book called The History of Love. It's been making me think about a lot of things. But mostly, as of late, what a memory looks like. If you follow my blog and are willing to comment, I'd like to know how they make you think too.
When I remember something, I see a snapshot of it in my head. When I think of sophomore year, I see two pictures of the building I lived in, one of it in the day with a brilliant blue sky behind it and one at night with the lamp lights all lit. When I think of the month of July, I picture the dusk, the sun has just set, the sky is pinking, and I'm standing by the field by my house; the lightning bugs are just beginning to blink off and on, and the tree, split by lightning, is growing darker in the shadows. When I remember my Grandma Fran, I see her sitting in a lawn chair right outside the garage in the hot summer sun, and my Grandpa Bob, I see him sitting at the old piano in the basement playing The Entertainer.
When I hear songs from my past, I can easily name the year I listened to them over and over again on repeat in my car. I remember years in emotions - a lot of the actual things that happened any given week in my life are lost, but I can feel quite clearly.
I've heard that scents are the most powerful memory triggers. Elsie walked into the apartment the other day and exclaimed that it smelled like when we lived on The Row, and she felt like she was in that year again. The perfume that Amy always wore in high school - it was something with a French name from a clothing store with loud music and dim lights that we all shopped at; it smelled like the waterfront and woods at the same time. If I smell it, it always makes me think of her and bonfires out in the country since we've sat at them together a hundred times.
I'm wondering if it's like this for everyone. Do you remember in feelings?
Or pictures, colors, sounds, something else?
The Mystery That Kills.
Just was reading this in Ezekiel (a strange/beautiful book) today:
"Cast away from you all the transgressions that you have committed, and make yourselves a new heart and a new spirit! Why will you die, O house of Israel? For I have no pleasure in the death of anyone, declares the Lord God; so turn, and live." Ch. 18, v. 31-32
This just made me think of how I often choose death via sin. These verses aren't talking about a physical death (well, in some cases, in might be) but a death of the spirit. Sin looks so appetizing from the outside: black and sparkly, a candy-coated thing that shines and emits all sorts of mystery. It promises life and knowledge and is a magnetic pull different from most other things in life. To remove the veil shrouding the whole thing seems to be something of beauty, at first, even though it doesn't quite seem right in the midst of the action. Once you take part, though, remove the veil, gossip, be spiteful, jealously covet, whatever it is, you find quickly that you're left with death. This can take the form of fear, shame, an emptiness...the death of a spirit is a terrible thing to experience. It's awful because we weren't meant to encounter it in the first place.
Even though there's a wide cultural gap between how we live now and how the Israelites were expected to live then, there is a great deal of comparison we can cast between us and the country of Israel. The Lord is constantly calling Israel, "a wayward child (Hosea 11:2)," back to Himself. In all of the filth and betrayal and sin that Israel wallows in over and over again throughout the years, God keeps loving fiercely and takes them back, always, just as they are - dirty and wounded, rebellious, unsure. It's the same with us.
He says, "I will betroth you to me in faithfulness. And you shall know the Lord...and I will sow her for myself in the land. And I will have mercy on No Mercy, and I will say to Not My People, 'You are my people'; and he shall say, 'You are my God.' Hosea 2:20, 23.
He wants us to live! He wants us to experience life without anxiety, without fear of being alone, without fear of other people, without this constant turning to death. He delights in our hearts, how each one was individually made, and He wants to put peace there, joy, grace, contentment.
I'm telling myself this today. "So turn, and live." It's what a heart longs for I think.
Peaches, hydration, and summer storms.
I swam in a lake today. My hair is still damp, and it's pretty humid out. I think it might storm later. Everyone's extraordinarily hot, and people keep walking over to the drinking fountain (I'm at work) and slurping for two minutes straight. It's nice to feel a bit worn out from swimming, have a little sunburn on my nose, and be freshly showered in the middle of the afternoon. I feel officially summered now. It was a little weird not moving back home for May/June/July after the semester ended, so summer didn't really have that big physical break for me.
I've always enjoyed summer. Vitamin D does good things. I was talking with Drew today, though, over giant hunks of cheese, pork tenderloins, and water crackers about summer noises and how sometimes they sound lonely. Here are the sounds I don't like in the summer:
The beeping sound garbage trucks make when they back up.
Birds that make overly shrill or repetitive calls; or crows.
Sometimes planes; unless it's night.
Windy, lonely trees.
People hammering on their roofs or decks.
Moving on to the positive, here are the things I do love about summer. I went biking down at the lakes in Minneapolis yesterday, and everything was summer to the max:
The smell of sunscreen. Coconut, water, cocoa butter, and beach sand all mixed together.
Sprinkler sounds.
Mowing sounds.
Very green trees that grow over roads and make canopies.
The heaviness, smell, and look of everything after a rainfall. Like you're in a clear cloud.
All the green in general.
Everyone congregates together at beaches, parks, exercising; community increases.
Grilling, smoky smells.
Corn on the cob.
The sky is especially nice some nights, right after the sun sets.
Watching the radar before a storm.
More time for sleeping, reading, resting, eating breakfast in the morning and truly living life.
P.S. 200th post! Happy birthday blog!
Growing Younger (Part 2)
(Continued from previous post.)
I asked all my friends two weeks ago what they thought their souls looked like, in regards to landscape or art. One of the dearest of mine said hers was an ocean of sorts. She is a glorious depth, though; a pressing of blue in a million shades, dappled sea mist, light-tipped waves, turquoise in the gentlest parts. There is a kingdom subsurface, and the rush of swells, the blast of current, can be seen occasionally, the gleaming bits of a watery country. Not to mention, entering the deep. Distant, boon, tempest. She says she stands on the shore, under the jagged crags, looking at the flat gray jewel of it all, afraid to step in. She doesn’t trust she wouldn’t be alone in there, which is essentially what we’re all afraid of if we’re honest. This is a shame because there is beauty afloat everywhere underneath (I’ve seen some of it). The weather in that place is cloudy today because of the fog. I’ll ask her for another weather forecast tomorrow. Some of my friends, I think, believe they are just columns of cement or lumps of ash and wet sand, but their souls are such weighty things of glory. We will be struck with the blaze of these when the right time comes.
I drove through Chicago once, and it made me think of how I’ve always thought life would be like once I was truly grown up (And what does that mean?). The apartment buildings there were mostly brick and ornate, sprawling upwards with elaborate cement patterns curling by the window corners. A black fire escape rested diagonally on various sides. Some were more modern with wide, glassy picture widows, white and black trim, the sky creamy in the reflection. Even still, but mostly in years past, I’d picture myself pulling on a pencil skirt while staring out at a city skyline, the sun a huge red semicircle, orange at the line were dusk meets the black earth. The city lights would be blinking on in the inky turning of the night, and the cars, two glows each, would never stop. But this was comforting – the white, yellow, and occasional red and blue, flickering around the skyscrapers. There is nothing of a child, gold-encrusted or otherwise, in this image. Reassuring this picture has always been but empty too.
Once, I stood in the fluorescent light of a stale, arctic frozen-foods aisle by the cheap ice cream. It was a sleepy hour, everything glazed over in the glaring off-white shade of the late night. Three boys, who were half a decade younger than I was, strolled toward me, suddenly, and pushed written numbers they had scrawled on the backs of ticket stubs into my hand. Call-me-baby, they said and sauntered away. I felt old and young at the same time then.
I think the idea of youth and the elderly is a different form altogether. Something stranger and more beautiful than we’ve all supposed. If you’ve ever known someone past small talk and past best friends forever and even past transgressions, you know that there is something in your heart that grows a little when it happens. A seed or something semiprecious. To be young was to be very straightforward – Will you be my friend? Yes. All right. – But now, that part has crawled away, and it takes layers and layers to peel back and see through to the purest of what we are. Community is a hot word these days, but maybe there’s a reason for this. Maybe all the learning, working, academics, the corporate ladder, the American dream, the five-or six-digit figures, the family with nice clothes and a sturdy house, the growing up, is really about crawling into the deepness that everyone carries around inside of them. There is something stale about growing old – stale and sad and lonely – but this is not how everything is supposed to be. It isn’t That’s how life is. Each day I am given the chance to grow but not young or old. The wrinkles humans don’t have or do, weight, muscle, skeletal build, is involved but not in the way I thought. It’s detached and irrelevant from this thing that is growing in our souls, out and over like a teeming forest maybe; it looks different for everyone. We are reaching toward each other.
Gathering at Diamonds Coffee Shoppe in Minneapolis, a small community of twenty-somethings, me included, sat in velvet chairs under cracking wood to practice growing; although, they called it something different than that, getting in-depth or going deep. A woman with short, dreaded pigtails behind the counter handed me the Ginger Ale I had bought. Just-an-ale,-huh? Ashley asked. One girl, another I had never met before, turned to me and asked how old I was. When I told her, she said, Well-ya-don’t-look-it-I-woulda-never-guessed-your-twenties. She had glasses and was sipping a latte. Normally, I would have felt burned. Inside, though, I smiled all over. It wasn’t because this was a compliment. I actually would have taken offense at other points in my life because I hate to be coddled. I was pleased because I recently have come into knowing that I’m not fastened - like J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan and his shadow – to this cabinet of a body that holds whole worlds. I am neither growing old nor young but simply around or near, my heart teeming, linking; a fastening with other hearts into a netted meshwork. We can toss this webbing into the ocean of the world then, and pull in the other free-floating hearts.
When my mother places her hand next to mine, I’ve stopped seeing our complexions.
The dog is only a sad thing because we think of animals having the same souls as people.
Someone I know well once said that she was not just a wall but a city of walls. I would think, in cities of walls, things grow slowly if at all. They are also hard to walk into. I’m trying to make a habit, now, of climbing over these bricked up places in those closest to me, helping stop the construction.
This is when I start to feel it coming. Slowly, and gently, the slow cover of dawn over a morning-flecked field.
I pause to turn my face to the sun for a vivid instant.
Something is blooming recklessly.
Growing Younger (Part 1)
(This is the first half of a creative piece I wrote for my senior writing capstone.)
Placing her hand next to mine, my mother compares our skin.
This happens in various settings. Sometimes we are shooting through the wind on the freeway at seventy miles an hour in a state with land like I’ve never seen before. Other times we’re in a waiting room. Once, we were eating dinner, and she put down her fork. Commenting on the smoothness of my skin’s pigment, the way the veins under the film of cells over my knuckles are barely visible, she holds our ages right up against the light in the kitchen and wonders.
I have a dog. I still have a dog. This is strange because it’s been more than fifteen years since we brought her home, a bundle of downy fur, docile and vibrant. Now she wears a blue polyester diaper made for animals too old not to wet themselves. Half-blind, she ends up stuck between the side table and the wall in the living room, generally, and I have to drag her out, one hand clasped on each brittle rib, to help her confusion and set her out in the middle of the floor where she can’t run into walls. There is always a smell of urine and must hovering. She slips down five stairs before I’m there again, reaching for her splintery torso.
Before all of this, we were much younger. We would race around the garden in a great rush of spring. Everything would be flowering carelessly after a rainfall, and the tradition was to go to the top of the hill, and wait behind the wet soil, which was sunk in the violet garden patch. At the count of three, the puppy (for she was a puppy then) would sprint on all fours up the hill while I sprinted on my two down the hill all the way to the monkey bars on to which I catapulted myself in a rush of adrenaline. Together, we’d breathe in great gasps of heavy, wet air.
I watch today as, now, the dog walks in circles until she has to sit out of exhaustion.
This is the stuff of beauty that I crumple as paper and cast out with the trash.
I traveled to Seattle this last summer. My family checked into a hotel in a dinky town in the early stages of Montana, and the woman at the desk asked me if I was over sixteen. This determined which color key card I would receive. I was twenty-one. I remember thinking that a tumbleweed would blow across the hot, dirty street at any moment, and anyone could notice the stale, yellow smoke stains on this lady’s teeth. The cracked plastic clock on the wall ticked loudly, and two men with pants that can only be described as “britches” sauntered in. Generally, I am pegged as a youth because I have no wrinkles and the skin over my knuckles is apparently smooth enough. Also, my voice is young. This all was to be resented.
Sometimes I think I am growing younger.
Everything is about rewinding in the world. Instead of reverently taking up each thread and binding it in careful beauty to the rest of the textile, we, women especially, yank the strands out with fervor. Dousing everything in chemicals, plucking out sagacity, tucking things where they aren’t supposed to go. That or trying to sew it up too fast, rushing the process, missing the detailed design. Either way, it all fades and shreds with the pulling. I always wanted the opposite.
I told my family once that I wished for wrinkles. Just one or two, I said.
Are-you-kidding-me-you’re-crazy, they said, and went back to eating corn on the cob.
I sloshed my fork around in my potatoes and watched birds land on the ledge of the roof outside the window. Robins have a lifespan of one year. Age is not a blinking thought to a bird, and then I noticed how I was living. That evening, sitting on the porch while the atmosphere was unrolling into dusk and beams of stars, the quietness and the green was what held it all, cradled the thought. I was trying to peel off youth, or rather, scoop it out of myself, like an avocado. What is it that makes us shrink away from treasures we are given on earth?
Bob Dylan says, “He who is not busy being born is busy dying.”
He also says, “No one is free, even the birds are chained to the sky.”
In the apartment building next to mine, there is a man who is busy being born. Every few days, I see him, shuffling down the sidewalk, winter or spring, his shoulders so stooped that his head comes straight out of his chest. There is no neck. A long, wolf-colored beard muddles down from his chin, and his hands are typically clasped behind his back. He looks old, rabbi-like, thoughtfully strolling.
The first time I noticed him, tottering methodically, thoughtfully, down the street, it was a whitish, cold day, and the trees looked lonely. In a tweed coat, he was unconcerned about the furiousness of the world. I hoped he wasn’t cold. Every other time I’ve seen him, he walks and walks, undaunted, the sun within his reach. The world has laid flat his shoulders, and still he uses his limbs to motor through the earth. With that attitude, he will hold the light. If my head came straight out from my chest, I wonder if this would change things.
There’s something of a child in all of us. Perhaps that is what feels so strange when one looks in the mirror between the ages of twelve and twenty-five. The outward casing is fading into something different, the adolescent is going somewhere – crawling into a place in the heart that is gold-plated, softened, something where revel has gathered, and this feels cumbersome. We mourn the nervous affair. Fearing the husk – but is it a husk? – we pack the old into beds and in buildings with colorless drywall and leave them there with the dripping of IVs and the beeping of monitors to wait for the gray to become grayer. My grandfather said that when he walked in malls for daily exercise, he felt as though he were invisible, less than a mannequin, a shadow moving around the perimeters. This is what we fear, more than being old, because being known is a great part of what we were made for. Without a heart staring back into your own heart, being young or old is fairly terrifying.
One day, we will look as our souls do.
(Part 2 coming soon.)
In the Flux.
Every time I come home from one of my late shifts, after midnight, there is always a bunny that frantically shoots out from behind the giant bush outside my apartment building and scares me to death. Now, some would say that I am doing the scaring, but at least I don't fire out from behind the shrubs at several mph. I generally am already a bit jittery because I have just closed everything down at work by myself, shut off all the lights, and walked quickly out to my car in the lonely parking lot. Sometimes, by the time I get back, I am thinking about the bunny, and sometimes I am not. Either way, every time I get home and it shoots out from behind the bedraggled bush and across the lawn, I jump and then quickly walk inside so as to avoid anything else that might pop out from behind the plants.
Also, lately, I've been sitting in a cubicle. In the last week, I've learned that office-chair posture is important so as to avoid lower back pain, I have been given my very own parking garage badge, and I have been assigned to make a glossary for a book I have never read before. A lot of things in my life are new right now, and that is all a hard but wonderful adjustment. I feel like I am just peaking the top of the transition-mountain now, and things are beginning to feel normal again. But not quite.
I also have a lot more alone time now which is strange and good. All year long I spent hours in class and hours doing homework, wishing that I had more wide open spaces of time, and now that I have more than I could ever want, I'm not quite sure what to do with it all. Well, that's not entirely true because I know of plenty of things I could do with it, but it almost feels immobilizing the way having too much to do does sometimes as well.
Something interesting: Been praying about the summer, and over the last couple of weeks, several completely unrelated people have recommended books to me on the subject of living life to its fullest or celebrating the extraordinary nature of everyday things. I literally have three books on this same topic sitting on my dresser right now. Funny this would all happen right when I suddenly have a lot of time to think about life and everything it entails ALL the time. The Lord provides.
I feel like I'm standing on the edge of a hill and God is asking me if I really want to keep barreling down it like a snowball. Always looking to the future or the next thing, picking up outings and events and days like a lint roller, merely noticing them, depositing them, and then continuing on my stampede to the next thing. Or (He's asking me this) you can sit right there, Lauren, on that red blanket, dew fresh on the grass, trees hushed and coming alive, all of them rustling with the weight of the song, and watch as I show you what the morning looks like from My angle - inside out and something like you've never seen before.
So I will be up front. I don't know what I'm doing, I feel fragile, I make myself weird lunches in a rush before work, I question my future, and I get scared by rabbits. But. I do know this: "The eyes of all look to you, and you give them their food in due season. You open your hand; you satisfy the desire of every living thing." Psalm 145:15-16
If you're feeling peculiar about the start of summer, take heart! You're not alone, and you have been given a great hope.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wth05NWtbZU&w=375&h=220]
Origin
We are them in many ways,named for past lovers, who fought each day with their spirits lit up in a flare of revel to keep it all close. (There is nothing new under the sun).
I pay homage each time I see you in the hall and when I sit with my back to the bedpost and reach up to hold your hand while you pass from throb to thought.
This room has been walked in before, and the walls ache just like the rest of the world. It is the freeze of the death; the mourning of blood from our thoughts.
This is a hotel of hearts. Choose carefully, choose nothing?
I walk until I reach the dawn.
© Lauren Bernhagen 2012
A Soul.
Here is a picture for you. There is a mountain side, crawling with pine trees. You're looking at it from both an aerial view and from the ground level. Depends on what part you want to see the most. There are several mountains, a range, stretching into the distance. They slope down from the sky toward an ocean that is deep and rushing, blue and white with froth toward the shore but flat and smooth in the deeper parts. The atmosphere looks like the water does, and there are the feathery remains of fog misting up as the air becomes more humid. The sun is brightening. In the forest, everything is flushed green, more so than you've ever seen before. Even the greens that would be considered closer to browns, the dusky colors, are luminescent. This is a different sort of place, and you want to understand it (as most people do).
There is a waiting here. In the forest, something is moving; you can tell right away. The ground is fluttering, 
trembling. There is a tremor flickering up the tree trunks and the plants are simmering in the soil - a great hush has fallen in this corner of the earth, but the sun is pouring through the cracks in the leaves, into the darkest parts of the woods. Everything is flaring green. The air is bright with the buzz. If someone were to walk through this forest, they would know something was about to happen. But they wouldn't drive themselves crazy trying to figure it out; it isn't that type of waiting. But then again, it is, in a way. They would want to stay and breathe in the colors and the sounds until they faded into it all. Anyone who is at this point wants to become a part of the scenery.
And then, the stirring can be heard. A shaking some would say, a rumbling in the deep. Out of the ground, somewhere in the middle, something is suddenly hurtling from the ground, shooting toward the sky at a great speed. A stalk of some sort, a giant stem. It is a vine, you realize all at once, and as you watch, the tendrils curling out at an amazing rate, wrapping around the tree trunks and rushing down the bluffs toward the sea in a great surge. There is nothing fearful about watching this, though; only a feeling of awe, maybe a bit of mystery. This is what you've been waiting for, although you never knew it before.
Now, the vine is blooming. Bursting with buds and new growth, everything fresh and vibrant, every corner of the mountain range. The forest is suddenly alive with this beautiful vine, and it is reaching out toward everything. As time goes on, twelve moons, twelve suns, maybe you lose track of the days, the vine changes its speed. Some days it slows, other days it only grows in one part of the woods. Once in a while nothing seems to happen at all (although, it is always altering, even if it's in a different part of the forest that you've never been to). Once it grew, but only on the inside; a photosynthesis of sorts. You most definitely didn't see that part happen.
The parts of the vine that are in the ocean are the most peculiar to you. Instead of ceasing growth on the shore, the tips simply resting in the remains of waves, the plant kept stretching, straight into the sea and down below the waves into the deep water, wrapping around the cliffs in the lower parts of the ocean. You wonder what this means. Also, in the last few days, the vine has been growing fruit. Citrus-like shapes that you've never seen before, reds, purples, richer brilliant colors. When they drop into the dirt, they melt into the soil, make it richer; everything is becoming healthier now. And right when you didn't know the forest was even sick (it was dying, actually). You always heard that plants gave off oxygen, but this vine is doing something even greater to the air. The trees, the birds, everything seems to be breathing more deeply. You certainly are. This is a big part of what the vine was about from the beginning.
You suddenly realize, though, that amidst all this glory, during this vine and everything it's been doing, the forest has been under a great attack.
This isn't how it was supposed to be. But it's where everything is now beginning.
This is the start of the grand adventure.
To read more, look here.
My Computer Charger Just Broke.
Good thing I have cool friends who know how to fix stuff like that. It's a dark gray, humid and stormy morning out - last day of classes. I think it always rains during finals week; even last December, when it was supposed to be snowing, it was raining somehow. Feels like tradition.
Here is what I have left to do this year:
- A 10-page paper on social media and communication - An 6-page paper in the place of my Classic Literature final (thank you Dr. Aling for canceling that, blessings upon you.) - A 3-page paper on a stress-related disease for Psychology of Stress Management - Continued revisions on my personal essay/poems for my Writing Capstone - One final. A test for Survey of American Literature on Monday
There it is.
I'm very much looking forward to this summer. I'm working at the front desk in the Student Center and interning at Minnesota Public Radio and Redleaf Press. Both internships are few enough hours that it works to do both. I am excited and nervous all at the same time. Nervous because I'm not sure what to expect at either internship. I know I will be clueless for the first couple of weeks and completely dependent on my supervisors to show me how everything works. More than nervous, though, I'm excited. I love starting new things, and I've been praying A LOT about these next few months and what they look like. Feeling peace from God.
Amy and Garrett got married this last Friday, so Ames has all her stuff packed up and is half moved out of the apartment. There's a lot of transitioning happening roommate-wise at our place right now. I don't want Kirsten to go to Virginia (there I said it). She is going to be amazing, though; she's working as a site director for YouthWorks, and I know God's going to do cool things with her heart. Not to mention she's going to do cool things with the hearts of those who are blessed to be on her staff and site. Thank goodness for Skype.
On to more trivial things - we've been out of pepper for some time now. We like highly seasoned food at our apartment. This is me writing a note to myself to get more next time I go grocery shopping. Speaking of, this is me writing a note to remind myself to go grocery shopping. Haven't gone for over a month. Living on Ritz crackers, peanut butter, and frozen peas right now. Peanut butter is such a necessary staple for poor college students. It's been nice this week to have leftover lasagna from the Student Activities dinner. Our room has been feasting.
Well I'm sitting in the coffee shop with Els and Drew right now, and we are all at odds with our homework. We don't want to do any of it.
This is officially a ramble. My teeth hurt.
Bye.
As I Lie in My Hotel Bed.
I am at a writing conference in Michigan, so it seems appropriate now that I would actually post something on this blog. One of the speakers at one of the sessions I went to yesterday said that if you are not posting on your blog multiple times a week or at least once a week, you can just forget it. This made me feel sad, and I hope that you all aren't sad or haven't given up on this blog because I promise there are still things happening in life, and I do want to tell you about them! There is a quote by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, the French author who wrote The Little Prince, that I've been thinking about the last couple of days. He says, "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea." This was said by one of the speakers at this conference in regards to writing as a profession.
"Can I write?" this author had asked a former professor.
"Well, do you like sentences?" the professor responded.
Brian Doyle, another speaker on writing in another session, went on for quite some time about witness and how we need to witness everything, even the most normal things, with "Naked, holy eyeballs and wild, open ears."
So more so than I ever have before, I know that I want to keep doing this. I want to record the "sky - bright with the rub of paradise" and all the other glorious, ordinary things in the world. Write and write until my face falls off or I die or God comes back. Right now, though, all my drift has to go toward my senior capstone. Hopefully I'll be able to blurb on here again before that's over with.
Here's to naked eyes and wild ears.