Stillness

Stillness is one of those funny deals that we through around with great respect to the idea but little adherence to the practice. Be still and know. Be still and listen. Be still and . . . oh look!

It is hard to be still and more so when it seems so unrewarding. But that is the problem We expect something out of stillness, and we are so busy waiting, looking, waiting patiently for that something, breath baited and eyes pealed, that we miss it. We miss everything.

My stillness today was a little atypical. I was attempting to send a text message. This is quite difficult for me. Really, quite difficult. I like to write somewhat correctly. Blatant misspellings are not acceptable (blatant meaning that I notice it). Besides, I wasn't too focused. I would stop and space into the distance. I was out walking for walking, for air, for it is my last day in Grand Rapids until it is time to come back.

Believe it or not, I was being still. Texting does not seem very still, not to those who watch those crack fingers punching keys at 200 words per minute and not to myself or others who labor over each letter, but this was stillness in some strange way. My mind was not whirling. It wasn't focused on much of anything. I was just breathing. Being. A funny concept, I know.

Anyway, amidst that, amidst that still moment after running from office to office tracking down professors and trying to hold myself together, two people popped into the moment, one right after another, two gals from the Spring Semester in Spain. They were both on the phone but they both took a moment to say hi, give a hug, and offer their prayers as I head home for the fall.

Had I not set myself down to breathe, attempted to send a text without much focus, had I not mistakenly slipped into stillness, I would not have seen either of these women who have a gift of sending out sunshine to whomsoever they encounter.

That is the point of stillness--when one is still, one is not expecting, one is vulnerable to the unknown . . . and the gems of stillness, of that unknown, are best seen in reflection.

Pictures Later

Today . . . today, today, today. This week. Hmm.

First ah-ha moment. Moreover, first, I-told-you-so moment. I went with a friend out for coffee and conversation. We headed out to Westside Coffee, which led us to West Cliff Drive, where we found a bench and sat and chatted and oohed and ahhed over the ocean and the sky. The sky was filled with varying clouds, cracking open occassionally to stream light down onto a silvery, choppy ocean that would glow golden with the peaking sun. The rain from which we received respite that day had lit the cliff tops and slopes electric shades of green and cleaned the air--we could see the towers at Moss Landing and the hills rising up behind Salinas and Castroville. We interrupted ourselves and eachother with oohs and moments of necessary basking and blathering as the sun broke through over our bench and commentaries on the beauty and oh look! a dolphin! and we ran further out onto the cliff to stand and point and become ever so much more excited each time the dolphin or its playmates resurfaced. Driving away from West Cliff, there ahead rose the Santa Cruz mountains, dripping, absolutely dripping with deep green trees. Not slopes, not inclines, but mountains. Not Shasta or the Sierra Nevada Range, but mountains. And then descending into the valley, down Graham Hill Road, with trees leaning, light streaming, a road cut in between descending hills . . . I was not wrong to feel helpless in attempting to convey a piece of this to my classmates in CAS 101, it is not comparable to anything anywhere I have ever seen, I was not idealizing it, painting it rosy in my mind to stab my heart. No. It is that beautiful, indescribable, irreplaceable.

Second ah-ha. The sky. Today was an all day in San Jose day. San Joe-zee. (I'm kidding if you, reader deary, don't speak Spanish or are not native to this area--'tis San Ho-say.) And a long while at the car dealership, where I plopped down on a strip of grass, layed on my back, and stared at the sky. Wow. Yup, wow.

It is not that the sky is a place of infrequent visual perusal, but rather that its importance just registered. It was so still. It was blue and puffed with clouds but still. Later, it acquired cloud streaks of a drying brush and feathered clouds and soon a river of watermarked clouds flowed through the center of my field of vision, behind the original sedentary clouds. The sky is like the ocean. It is always there, but it is always different. It is changeable, unreliable in form, but reliable in existance. It would be heart breaking, it is heart breaking, to see it polluted and unhealthy. And I rely on its existance. The sky does not replace the ocean for me; the ocean has branded a lodging for itself upon my heart where only it will ever fit. So I live with its absence in Grand Rapids. But in Grand Rapids, the sky took hold in a way it never had. Here the sky is big. Here it can blend with the ocean, expand into the ocean, be sawed by trees or mountains. Here it is dark at night, lit by its own stars. In Grand Rapids the stars are not so available, but the sky moves. The clouds are more and more variable. The sunrises and sunsets have a dynamism unlike those here--for while they set along flat horizons and softer, rounder, smaller trees, they set with an expansiveness that shrinks one down to the reality of one's smallness the way the ocean can. They set in a dancing, painted sky of immense proportions. The sky, the sky is necessary.

Third ah-ha. Driving back from San Jose, over 17 by myself in the van. KRTY playing, as I swung up and down the curves through the mountains, George Strait's "I Saw God Today." Maybe it is a cheesy song. Maybe I am "cute-sy" as a roommate stated this semester.
"Just walked down the street to the coffee shop, I had to take a break, I'd been by her side for 18 hours straight. Saw a flower growing in the middle of the side walk, pushing up through the concrete, like it was planted right there for me to see. The flashing lights, the honking horns all seemed to fade away, in the shadow of that hospital, at 5:08, I saw God today. I've been to Church, I've read the book, I know he's here but I don't look near as often as I should. His fingerprints are everywhere, I just slowed down to stop and stare, opened my eyes and man I swear, I saw God today."
I haven't read the book, I won't comment any further on my unorthodox status of haves and have not's and do's and do not's, but I will say this much: those moments of finding a flower in the sidewalk are the most overwhelming moments of ah-ha. How else would the sky be noted in San Jose and Grand Rapids and be found to be so compelling?

The Big Brownie

Okay, so Grand Rapids is not as palatable as chocolate, or at least no with such frequency. But brownies and today have something in common.


Today we are getting are first sticking snow, our first real snow of the season, and I love it! I love the first snow because of the smell, the crispness of the air, and the likeness to the shaking of powdered sugar over brownies: when it is done gently and evenly, the brownie gradually disappears under a blanket of sugar (well, one typically stops before that). The first snow is so similar, and I can't help but get so excited.


Walking to class this morning, it was all I could do not to drop my back pack and go skuttling around in circles with my mouth open, tongue out, grinning like there's no tomorrow. I do miss California winters, the wet season, the lulling crisp and cleansing rains but in exchange for standing out in the first rain, bare-foot and silly, I stand out in the first sticking snow, just as delighted, as the shimmering flakes swirl and dance.

A Moment of Calm

Professors are cool. That reads sooo eloquently, doesn't it? But I do mean it.

Sunday evening, our CAS professor had the class over for a pre-Thanksgiving dinner. And it was wonderful. She has a fireplace in her home, a real, wood-burning fireplace. The paint in the room, the furniture, the trim were warm and welcoming. Homes are beautiful, beautiful places. We sat around the living room in an oblong circle, talked some, had some measures of silence, met her younger son (who was quite adorable), laughed, shared a sliver of life for a moment . . . it took me by surprise, the calm, the peace, the welcome, the feeling of home.

November Thoughts

This morning the sunrise was astounding. Not at first. At first I went to the field behind DeVos and decided that although watching the sunrise is more about the peace than the painting, this uneventful color scheme could be passed over for presentation preperation. Once the library had opened and I trucked up to the fifth floor, I looked east to see the sun peaking up, dripping with color.
It was all I could do to not run. I moved as quickly as my non running feet would take me back under the Beltline (all I wanted to do was take off my shoes and run, I was so excited), slipped off my flats, and moved up the hill to field bare-foot. It was gorgeous. I must have been there a half an hour, freezing my feet off until I finally bid goodbye to the horizon to clean up and head back to homework--but, oh! What a sight.
Mornings are best quiet. I suppose it isn't truly quiet with the Beltline roaring behind or Burton humming ahead, but there aren't voices. The birds chatter, squirrels fidget, the wind blows the switches of the willows, geese honk, but inside is a silent well of joy, of peace, of I think I can make it through this day after all.
Sunset was phenomenal also. Although I was constricted to the apartment and theology readings, from the sliding door the sky was permeated with pink . . .
Michigan has something I'm not used to, something that scared me at first, but something I have learned to love: a big sky. I can't imagine it bigger, but know it must be in the prarie states and parts of the south. The immensity is amplified by the distinction between land and sky (it cannot not mingle with any ocean) and the events that parade across daily. I'll miss this sky someday. For now, I'll just enjoy it. Mornings. Mornings in Michigan are the best part of November 2010 thus far.

In Love with Simplicity

"Ohh Michigan" is one of the most over-used expressions of *sigh* of "I'm sick of college/Calvin/here/what you will," but I am using it as a phrase of endearment. The trees are on fire here. Flaming. Is it really October though? The trees are on fire AND the sun rays are wrapping around my skin as though it were a mild summer day. The trees are on fire and not all the flowers have withered or dropped--color, color, color. It is so simple, so ritual, and so irrevocably necessary to the cultivating of awe to pause and note.

If I were to wind up living here, and I would muchover prefer it to Los Angeles, my yard would be boardered with mixed wildflowers, tangled and tripping over one another with dandelions on the less trampled but always ragged lawn. The backyard would no doubt have a garden. And I would never miss ArtPrize. (I did not, unfortunately, make it down this year, and am very sorry for it.) This city is not a big, hopping, dynamic city, me han dicho, and suberbia is, suberbia, but it looses its monotony without overembellishment where the wild things grow near the soccer fields, in unminded lawns, in art.

The Farmer's Market again has done me well. Chard, swiss chard, was my splurge purchase, and it was delicious. 1 Tablespoon olive oil, 1 clove garlic, red pepper flakes, sautéed; 1 T water, a bunch of chopped chard, salt, added and mixed and covered about 4 minutes, served with fresh out of the oven, homemade pugliese bread (altered: half whole wheat flour, some corn meal, and white flour). MMMMMM!!!

Flowers and Food

Most exciting things in my life right now: not much. Today I cooked acorn squash, chick pea, potato, curry stew and also (managed to burn my oats--napping is always a bad idea) baked pugliese bread, banana chocolate chip bread, and moved sourdough onto its next stage of sitting and festering. Fester fester fester, rot rot rot. But there are still inexplicably delightful bits of lightness and cheer in my life, like this flower . . .

. . . from Dahlia Farms, Fulton Farmer's Market: a wild and dazzling joy.

Thanks Libby!