windows down

When I have a rough day or things just feel more heavy than it seems like I can take, going for a drive is something that almost always brings me back to Earth. There’s something about playing a song that matters and sticking your hand out the window to feel the air while you’re driving…

Have you ever done that? Have you felt the wind pushing your fingers into new places while you’re rolling down a back road in your home town?

Or felt the way a moment feels new every time that cool fall air hits the palm of your hand while you’re driving through your new city? Watching the lights flick past you, sending shadows across the life lines of your fingers, street lights illuminating the creases in your knuckles. Falling in love with the way you can’t help but dance your hand around in the wind, feeling it give and take with each twist of your wrist. Out of all the things you could have touched that day, somehow the feeling of freedom in this moment makes you feel alive again. And even when you pull your hand back, you can still feel that slight tingle across your skin reminding you that you’re still there, that the air that feels so strong around you is a part of you, too.

Tonight there was a concert for a musician that I really love in town. I randomly saw on social media that there were a couple free tickets to the show at a shop that I love downtown. They hadn’t yet been claimed when I finally got there to check. So I got to stand in the crowded lower room of a theater and felt the floor move when everyone was singing along to the music. I got to make someone else’s night when they offered to take my photo in front of the sign outside and mentioned they were about to go in themselves and buy their ticket, but I had an extra and I offered it to them instead. There was a moment during the concert that Noah Kahan’s face just lit up when the whole room seemed to be connected in that song. In a season where nothing has felt like it was going right, tonight I felt okay.

I felt okay.

And I took the long way home after the concert to listen to more of this musician’s music with every window down. The highway opening up in front of me with nothing but a few hours of night left in my way. I’m so thankful that I got to feel the way my hand moves in the air when I’m driving at night. I’m thankful to feel the crispness of the beginning of fall on my face while i was walking home. I’m thankful for being alive to experience those little moments.

I hope you get to see these moments too.

I guess that’s all I have to say tonight. I’m just thankful for today.

Talk soon.

lost cicadas

"this cicada song could be heard
 all the way in San Francisco, I’m sure
 their pulses looking for home 
 but our backs are flat against the earth 
 to feel grounded in something pushing back at us
 it feels like I’ve been here a thousand times 
 for the first time. 
 and somehow, it’s okay. 
 this wind will carry you with me
 until our feet don’t tire from carrying songs
 what were never meant for us"

I’m lucky. The place that I work is only a couple blocks from the inner-most downtown area of my city. I’m walking distance from all the hustle and bustle I could possibly want to be a part of. But I’m also just minutes away from a grassy area hugging the canal, where I can feel a breeze that wasn’t meant for me pushing through some shady willow trees on my lunch break. A rare quiet space so close to downtown, even with everyone passing through in that noon hour.

It’s been awhile since I’ve taken advantage of this space. It’s been awhile since I’ve sat on those man-made boulders that form steps reaching towards the water. And it’s been awhile since I’ve been reading in my spare moments instead of doing anything else. But today the sun was too perfect and the breeze felt good on my skin, so I found myself walking the path from campus to that shady spot when I clocked out for lunch.

Have you ever had that gut feeling hit you that you’re exactly where you are supposed to be in that moment? Where you look up and just know that you’re going the right direction? The last two years, most of those moments for me have completely taken me aback. And most of them were in moments that I got to share with someone I love. Where we both could stand there and just sense that no matter what happened moving forward, we were right where we were supposed to be in that moment together. Well, I made my way down those grassy steps today and it felt like I could breathe again after holding my breath for far longer than I could have realized.

I sat down in the shade and started reading searching for sunday by Rachel Held Evans. It’s a book that I didn’t realize I needed until I really started digging in. It’s about loving the church, then feeling lost in the church, and looking for a way back into this thing that you temporarily lost faith in. Not that you lost faith in your beliefs, but lost faith in the systems that are cultivating the beliefs around you. I’m only about halfway through this story and it’s everything I couldn’t have asked for, but I’m glad it’s being given to me anyway.

The way Rachel talks about feeling so secure in her identity in the church and then losing that identity and trying to find your way back to it is something I feel so deeply inside me. Even outside my faith journey, I’ve tried to hold onto these ideas that I thought made me who I am but I’ve been realizing over and over that I have to let go of how I thought things worked and who I thought I was supposed to be if I ever want to reach myself again. That feeling of not being sure if you believe the things you tell yourself about who you are or the feeling of not being sure if the things you believe in are truth can be so disorienting. But Rachel said something that sums up my experience with keeping on with this work in progress anyway:

“It’s [searching for sunday] about why, even on days when I suspect all this talk of Jesus and resurrection and life everlasting is a bunch of bunk designed to coddle us through an essentially meaningless existence, I should still like to be buried with my feet facing the rising sun. . . Just in case.”

This idea is what keeps me going most days. That even though I don’t feel whole or feel like I’m where I’m “supposed” to be in my life, I still want to do what I can to get to that place because some day I might actually get there. That even though I know that no one has it together so it’s fine that I don’t have my shit together either, I still want to be a little kinder than I have to be just because I don’t know if the people I’m coming in contact with are struggling just as much as I am.

I sat outside and just felt like the cicadas were letting me – and anyone who took the time to hear them – know that it’s going to be okay. It felt like they were saying I am home, even in this grassy area. That even though I’ve been feeling a bit lost most days as of late, it’s going to be okay. At the beginning of one of the chapters, Rachel quotes Gregory Alan Isakov’s song “The Stable Song” by saying “I threw stones at the stars, but the whole sky fell” and I felt compelled to listen to it again right then. The six-minute song felt like worship when I was just laying on my back, listening to it mix with the lost cicadas.

I’m not sure why I decided to go for that walk today, but I do know this work in progress heart needed that grounding energy. I needed that breeze to remind me that things that leave us have a way of coming back. I needed to read the words that I read from this book.

I hope you find yourself where you need to be today too. I hope you feel as close to yourself as you can in this moment. I’m walking this mess of a story right alongside you.

"remember when our songs were just like prayers
like gospel hymns that you called in the air. 
come down, come down sweet reverence, 
unto my simple house and ring... and ring" - the stable song

Talk soon.

Make it Make You Better.

An account that I follow on Instagram called “We’re Not Really Strangers” posted this photo the other day. (Which, if you haven’t seen their work before, I highly recommend it. But that’s besides the point.)

MAKE IT MAKE YOU BETTER.
(Credit to @werenotreallystrangers on Instagram)

And I’ll tell you what, reading those five words made me stop in my tracks. Because I think sometimes we are told too often to just look for the lesson when something or someone happens to you in life. We’re told to just figure out what the purpose of that experience was and then figuring that out will help us just let it go and move on.

But I think it’s more complicated than that. With things that have been happening in my life lately, I’ve given myself time to just earnestly look at the situations and experiences with those people and I can see all these things that I learned from those situations. I can see the “lessons” that can come from what happened and I can even apply them to my life in more meaningful ways. However, being able to know or see what a relationship or experience can teach you doesn’t make it easier to swallow when the memories come rushing back or you realize how much something really is effecting you. It doesn’t always make it easier to sleep at night or to let go of some of the hurt that they caused you.

So I like the way this post made me think about things.

Make it make you better.

Make the shitty experience or the heartbreak or the lessons make you work to be better. For yourself. Make these hard, gross feelings make you work harder for what it is you want to see in your life. Make the long nights of no sleep worth something. Maybe this means you’re keeping to yourself and letting your confidence on your own grow. Maybe it means making a schedule for yourself that you actually keep so you can meet goals that you want. Maybe it means throwing out the walkie talkie to someone else so you don’t have to feel alone in this new space. Maybe it means holding yourself accountable for your own feelings around the situation. Make it make you better. Don’t let the heartbreak be something that only drags you down. And it’s not because you shouldn’t be feeling all those feelings – you deserve to feel all that you need to and that’s valid. But the thing is, at some point you’ve got to make all those hard emotions work for you and not against you. Make them mold you more into yourself and into who you are wanting to be as your most authentic self.

This is a shorter post, but I had to share some quick thoughts on it.

Because damn, make it make you better feels like exactly the mantra that I needed in my life today. And maybe it’s the kind of mantra you needed to hear on this Monday morning too.

Thanks for joining me where you’re at. Thanks for leaning in a bit. I hope you try to look at the tough things happening in your life and see ways that you can use it to make yourself a little more authentically you.

Don’t be ashamed of being a work in progress. It’s okay if the growing pains get you down some days.

It’s going to be okay.

Talk soon.

Tattoos of Home

I’ll be honest, lately I have been struggling with the idea of home at my core. There have been so many pieces of my life up in the air, things that don’t fit anymore, roots that were pulled out forcefully, situations that changed the landscape by moving along like a glacier, slowly enough that I didn’t realize what was changing until the transformation had already occurred.

And me, being the rational person that I am, have been dealing with this rootlessness by a healthy dose of introspection and tattoo therapy. (Okay, maybe real therapy too, but when you just walk in to a tattoo parlor and get ink on a whim it feels pretty much the same as a good talk therapy session.)

Now, the tattoo artist that I had start what will become my sleeve just had a beautiful little human and isn’t opening her books until October, but that is only giving me altogether too much time think about the pieces I want to incorporate into the rest of my sleeve. In this process of thinking about what all my tattoos up until now mean to me, I realized that I want this sleeve to be my connection/reflection on my roots and family. I have daisies on my shoulder for myself (three of them, because three is a consistently important number in my life). But I want to add to that. And thinking about what home is to me has had me remembering how much of my childhood I connect to being outside and exploring with my family. Like well, everyone, my family history even when I was young was complicated. So much of the people I was raised with as family were not blood but chosen, if only for a small part of my life.

When I meet back with my tattoo artist this fall, I want to begin working on a half sleeve that feels like being grounded to me. So far all of my tattoos are either pieces of nature or words that feed me and I plan on continuing that through this sleeve with pieces of the natural world that serve as a map of where I’ve been and where I’m going. That look like reminders of people or situations that left indentations on my skin reflecting who I am now.

So I guess home is a valley filled with yellow bursts of black-eyed susans, welcoming me every time I turn towards the place I’m from.

Home is strawberries in the summer and enjoying the jam from my grandma for the rest of the year, the little square containers of them resting in the corner of the freezer in hopes to last until we can make more when the weather changes.

Home is memories of picking mint leaves at eight years old and squeezing the oils out between my two fingers so the scent stays with me as long as possible.

Home is knowing that sometimes trees have to be cut down to make room for new growth and that growth sometimes has to happen because someone decides to leave without warning.

Tree rings marking the place they decided to leave, the years rooted in place marking the time we had with them.

Home is loving the mountains but appreciating the endless horizon of fields in Indiana.

Home is wherever I’m existing as authentically as I can.

Home is safety that we’ve built for ourselves.

Home is knowing we have somewhere to come back to when we’ve wandered a bit too far.

Finding home has always weighed heavily on me. As you’ve read before, I seem to always be looking for ways to feel grounded while still reaching for the farthest branches. What grounds you? What images resonate in you so much that when you see them, the air shifts and you remember some key piece of your becoming?

I told myself I won’t get another tattoo on a whim until I can get back behind the needle for this sleeve of mine. I can’t wait until October rolls around. Restlessness and recklessness sometimes go hand in hand for me but this sleeve is something that I want to be well planned out. Here’s to this specific work in progress. To continually digging a little deeper in the hopes of finding new roots.

Talk soon.