ABIDING HERE

Rebekah and I made a last minute decision to dress-up for Halloween: as our parents in their early 20s . Johnathan was good enough to take photos. Mom decorated our yard as tradition with warmth, light and a welcoming table of hot cider and chocolate for the parents of the trick-or-treaters. While Bekah and I walked a plate of pumpkin bars up the hill to the Soby's, two grown men morphed into "zombies", dragged their feet and moaned my name. I was startled. 

Last night after work, I crashed Bekah's sleepover as they watched Pride and Prejudice. Man. I was a mess. The scene when Elizabeth refuses Darcy in the rain, when she reads the letter of his explanation, when she tours Pemberley and stumbles upon him with Georgiana, when they meet in the meadow at dawn, unified and embracing, and when he calls her Mrs. Darcy by the lake--I soaked a pillow with tears... emotional much?

I met again with a group of writers; my friends, in an a coffee shop as narrow as an alley with an x-ray illuminator screen propped onto the bathroom wall and coffee that put most to shame. We paired off to tell a dream in turn, then retold the dream of our friend in a story. They were humorous, glorious, and ridiculous. We wrote a narrative with no more than 3-word sentences. Later, we chose a song-lyric, a sentence or so, and free-wrote until the emotions related to the verse swooned from us into paragraphs. Such an enriching time and from that time, I have continued to write, almost obsessively... for two and a half days between sleep and work, hardly eating, typing, typing: releasing, my cage lifted, lifted until I was freed. 

I have a story I'm writing. It won't be ready for another decade, but it is time to begin. I am ready. I have also thought of two children's stories recently! The first is about a car salesman who cannot sell cars and the other a wordless story of a leaf's adventure. 

Friday was a sweetly spent morning with two little misters. As I held the littlest mister, listening to him experiment with his vocal range and coo, I noticed a sparkle of glee-like mischief behind his blue eyes before he belched and spat his milk up and down my legs. I had to laugh. He thought it was funny too. 

At work, I met a couple whose beloved wiener dogs persuaded them to tattoo Picasso's drawing of wiener dogs onto their arms. They were precious. 

Lately, I've had very strange dreams. Stranger even than Lewis Carroll's mind. Each night, somebody new enters and we create thousands of nonexistent, foreign memories, obscure and extreme. It's hard to wake up out of them, because I want to re-enter and create more. 

As I walked from the Cathedral to Groundswell and Hamline Sunday afternoon, I was disappointed by how few people were out without ear-buds or running shoes and garb. Out of 100 people, there was only one man who passed me with a kindly smile and a book under his arm, clearly taking in the blustering wind that picked and tossed the golden, violet, scarlet, orange and soft teal leaves in a dance between the intellectual streets (Oxford, Milton, Chatsworth, etc). 

The cast had its first read-through around a table for brunch on Saturday. We laughed and cried: so moved by the story and how it dipped into us, opening and turning our walls inside out. What a lively, caring and authentic bunch! I am excited for all that I will learn from these talented actresses and directors. 

At a favorite coffeehouse, I researched the true story behind the script and learned that the character I play was real: her name was Susan Harling Robinson. She was best friends with her brother, Robert. When she died, Robert wanted her son to know what sort of woman she was, as he was very young when she died, so he wrote 'Steel Magnolias.' I feel honored to play her. I hope to do her memory justice.

Something golden: Each week, I increasingly become more and more thankful (if that's even possible!) for my small group, which is truly like family. We meet together on Sundays between sunset and dark to live life together... and I'm learning so much about Jesus--not only about him, but what he looks like, lived out in flesh, through these selfless people. They are light. They are beautiful to me.

I have been reading 1 John this week. And then again. It pierces softly like strong-summer grass beneath me when I lay under the sun.

abiding,
m


P.S. Re-discovered Mary Oliver; we see through eyes quite alike: 

"Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift." 

"Listen--are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?" 

"I want to think again of dangerous and noble things. I want to be light and frolicsome. I want to be improbable and beautiful and afraid of nothing as though I had wings."

“Ten times a day something happens to me like this - some strengthening throb of amazement - some good sweet empathic ping and swell. This is the first, the wildest and the wisest thing I know: that the soul exists and is built entirely out of attentiveness.” 

"For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.” 

“So every day, so every day, I was surrounded by the beautiful crying forth of the ideas of God, one of which was you.” 

"I held my breath as we do sometimes to stop time when something wonderful has touched us...” 

“He is exactly the poem I wanted to write.” 

Liekeland.

P.S.S. I have an incurable crush on Ray LaMongtagne's voice.  

P.S.S.S. Discovered the oddly adoring style of Dory Previn's. Her way of song-writing, the depth of feeling, is a kindred spirit: "The Christmas Crooked Star, '73"

P.S.S.S.S. Enraptured: Liekeland illustrations

P.S.S.S.S.S. Loveliness: Christopher Tignor - "Cathedral, Part 2"